


Both Sides Now

by KindSoberandFullyDressed



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe - 1960s, Drugs, F/M, Outdated Language, Protests, Sex, Vietnam War, Violence, War, this is going to be a heavy one just warning y'all
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:06:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25664851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KindSoberandFullyDressed/pseuds/KindSoberandFullyDressed
Summary: Katniss's best friend Gale may want to fight the system, but Katniss just wants to earn enough money for her little brother to go to college and avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. Then she and Peeta Mellark become partners in a school project, and feelings begin to develop that she doesn't quite understand, feelings that she never wanted when the world is such an unforgiving place.The times they are a-changin'.
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Comments: 54
Kudos: 44





	1. Save the Last Dance for Me: Peeta

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all, welcome to my fic! A couple of things to apply to this work in general:
> 
> -This is the 1960s, so that means outdated values, beliefs, language, actions, etc. I'll try to note anything that would be super triggering before the chapter, but as a general note, just because a character does an action (i.e. smoke a cigarette) doesn't mean I'm actually endorsing it. It just means people did those things at that time and so that's how I'm writing it.  
> -I'm not sure how "major" of a character qualifies as a "major character death" but um, yeah, the Vietnam War is going to feature heavily in this so just be prepared for that later on in the fic.  
> -So yeah basically if you're sensitive this might not be the right work for you, and I totally understand if you ever need to drop it.  
> -Prim is now Katniss's brother "Primo" because I needed Katniss to be invested in this war and the prospect of it continuing.  
> -Music has been a huge influence in this work and all of the titles are an actual song (most from this same time period). I'll try to note all of them at the end of each chapter if not specifically mentioned in the chapter. :)  
> -Lastly, I'm not a historian by any means, just someone who's fascinated by it. So I'm doing the research as best I know how, but I'm sure some of this will be anachronistic. 
> 
> I think that's everything for now...thanks for giving this fic a shot!

There were two dozen girls in the gym, short and tall, brunette and blonde, smiling and giggling as Coach Chaff led us through the doors, but I only looked for one. I was fairly certain we had P.E. the same period. For a moment as I scanned the girls’ faces, I thought I had gotten it wrong. But no—there she was, on the far left and standing in the back. Her smooth black hair in its signature braid, gray eyes staring at the boys in that unaffected, almost cold expression that was usually on her face. She wore the girls’ mandatory gym uniform, a short romper that left her legs nearly completely bare, her olive skin luminous even under the florescent lights. She stood beside Madge Undersee, whose cheeks were flushed pink and kept her eyes on the on the gym floor’s painted lines.

Katniss Everdeen, the girl I’d been in love with since I was five, but had only ever said a handful of words to. I’d been getting my nerve up all year to talk to her. I’d walk into the record store she worked at after school, flip through their music, and walk out again. I didn’t want to pick out any music that would be dumb, but I didn’t know what would impress her. She kept to herself after school, never going to dances or parties. She hadn’t been to church for at least ten years. And any time I had even the slightest bit of courage at school when I caught her eye, she turned away quickly, dashing my nerves. 

But when Coach Chaff had told us last week we would be starting our dance unit for P.E. and combining with Miss Seeder’s girls’ P.E. class, I had determined that this was my opportunity. I needed a partner. She needed a partner. 

_This was it._

Miss Seeder stepped up as the boys all lined up across from the girls, near a record player that had been set up. The anticipation and hormones filled the sweat-soaked gym.

“All right boys and girls,” she said. “As you know, Coach Chaff and I have combined classes for the next two weeks to go over our dance unit for P.E. We will be learning the waltz this week and the foxtrot next week. You will be partnered up with someone from the opposite sex.”

My core tightened as some of the girls giggled at this. I didn’t have to look at her to know that she hadn’t. She must be hating this unit. Did I want to be associated with this if she had such negative feelings toward it? _No._ I’d spent all weekend pumping up for this. We only had a little more than a year until we graduated. After that, there was no guarantee we’d ever have to see each other again.

“Each Friday you will dance what we learned that week for myself or Coach Chaff and receive a grade for each dance,” Miss Seeder said. “Boys, please ask a girl of your choosing to be your partner for this unit, then form a circle with your partner.”

Some of the boys confidently strode forward, the ones with the girlfriends in the class and the good-looking ones. Others took hesitant steps forward. I drew in a breath and crossed the gym in a diagonal toward her, focusing on just moving one foot in front of the other. She scanned the room as boys made their way over to a girl, never locking in on anyone until I was only a few feet away from her. She turned and looked at Madge, who had just been asked to dance, and then locked eyes on me as it became clear I was coming toward her.

Then I was in front of her, just looking into her eyes. 

_Speak._

“Katniss?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Do you want to be partners?”

“Sure,” she said.

Although I could imagine Miss Seeder lecturing the girls to accept whatever boy asked them, the fact that she said yes—or, okay, _sure_ —loosened the knot of anxiety for a moment, before I remembered now I’d have to dance with her. For two weeks.

“Um, well, then we should probably get in the circle,” I said.

Katniss just nodded and followed me to the circle that had become more of an oval. Some of the couples held each other’s hands, some chatting to each other. Katniss kept her arms firmly crossed against her chest and her eyes adverted from mine. Great. So she did say yes out of politeness. I set my jaw. Well, I had two weeks. What could I expect? That she would fall into my arms swooning? That wasn’t Katniss at all.

As the last of the partners came into the circle, Miss Seeder began instructing the class on the proper steps for a waltz dance, first the boys’ part, then the girls’, and most of the class Katniss and I stood awkwardly next to each other, going over the steps on our own. After making a round to see how everyone was doing, she called over Coach Chaff to demonstrate the proper hold for a waltz—man’s hand on the woman’s shoulder blade, her hand on his bicep and their free hands clasped together. With Coach Chaff’s missing arm from the Second World War, Miss Seeder held his stub. There was still quite a bit of distance between the two of them, but Katniss would be nearer to me than she’d ever been before. 

“Okay,” Miss Seeder said as she broke from Coach Chaff. “We have time for one song for you to go over your box step. Tomorrow we’ll continue with practicing right away.”

Coach Chaff moved the needle on the record player, and “Save the Last Dance for Me” by the Drifters crackled onto the record player. I took a deep breath and turned to Katniss. The lead singer began to croon, 

> _You can dance every dance with the guy_  
>  _Who gives you the eye, let him hold you tight._

“Can I—you know,” I said. Katniss doesn’t seem like the kind of girl you just grabbed by the waist, even for a P.E. class. “Can I dance with you?”

“I did say we could be partners,” she said slowly.

“Right,” I said. 

I took her hand first, calloused and small, wrapping it in mine. That seemed the safest step first. She did me the favor of moving closer and putting her other hand on my bicep, and I found her shoulder blade like our teachers had shown. We had enough room for Jesus between us, as my Sunday school teacher always reminded our class, but that didn’t stop my heart from pounding, or thinking of what it would be like to have her closer so that there wasn’t room for anything between us. She smelled like pine, somehow feminine on her. And this close, I could make out the striations in her gray eyes, where the color shifted. I thought of how I could spend forever looking at her eyes and still want more.

_Hold it together._

“Um, okay, so it’s like this,” I said, taking a step forward while Katniss followed my step back. To the right, together, step back, together, left, together. I wanted to be smooth, but I had to glance down at my feet, then stared at them. I paused between each step, trying to get my muscles to remember the steps I’d practiced earlier in the period.

“Peeta,” Katniss said, pressing her hand to my shoulder to stop me. 

I looked up at her. “Yes?”

“Relax,” she said. “It’s just P.E. Coach Chaff will probably give all of you guys A’s just for putting on your shorts.”

“Right,” I said. “Sorry, I just, I haven’t really danced like this before.”

“Neither have I,” Katniss said. “Well, not for a long time anyway. So let’s just go slow?”

I nodded, and the song continued, 

> _Baby, don't you know I love you so?_  
>  _Can't you feel it when we touch?_  
>  _I will never, never let you go_  
>  _I love you, oh, so much_

I moved in the box Miss Seeder and Coach Chaff showed up, trying to relax like Katniss told me to. We silently moved in the box. It might have been slow, but with Katniss’s words encouraging me, the tension released from my muscles, and even when I tripped over my feet, we kept up the practice.

> _Cause don’t forget who’s taking you home,_  
>  _And in whose arms you’re gonna be,_  
>  _So darling, save the last dance for me._

The song ended, and Coach Chaff lifted the needle from the record. 

“All right everyone, hit the showers.”

I really wished Coach Chaff hadn’t mentioned showers while Katniss’s hand was still on my arm, or her earthy scent overtaking even the musty gym smell. I dropped her hand and stepped back from her. The cotton of my gym shorts hadn’t provided enough cover for the effect she was having on me, but thankfully her eyes were away from me again.

“Thank you,” she said, still not looking at me. “For, um, asking me to be your partner.”

I was shocked at her comment. I had clearly been the worst boy in the class. Miss Seeder must have told the girls to be polite and thank the boys for the dance anyway. I would do better tomorrow.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

She gave me a brief glance before turning and exiting the gym toward the girls’ locker room. I joined the other boys, stripping down and joining twenty-four other boys in rinsing off. We hadn’t exerted ourselves physically very much today, but all of us had to make exertions in other ways.

“You did it,” Darius clapped me on the back as I ran a bar of soap over my chest. “You talked to her!”

Although Katniss may have been clueless, for the guys on my football and wrestling teams, my crush had been evident for years now. 

“Yeah, and just about ruined any chance I had before,” I said, rinsing off the suds. “I was such a dope.”

“Katniss must like dopes, then,” Darius said, quickly running the soap over his body.

“What do you mean?”

“The girl has two looks: disinterest and murder. She didn’t look so disinterested, or murderous to me.”

I shut off the water as Darius stepped into his own shower head, rinsing off. “Really? It felt like she was just kind of ignoring me.”

“I can’t tell what Katniss was thinking,” Darius said, turning his head to talk to me, “but I haven’t seen her act that way around anyone, whatever it was.”

I grabbed my towel from its peg and dried off. If I might have a chance with Katniss, if I could recover from whatever the hell I was doing today…I had to form a game plan.

* * *

  
“Wow,” Lavinia signed to me later that afternoon. “You asked her to be your dance partner?”

Like most afternoons, I hadn’t felt like being home after Ma got back from her shift at the bakery, so I had gone over next door to Lavinia’s place. Both of her parents had to work, so we’d spent a good portion of our childhood alone together, and had resulted in my being unintentionally bilingual as I picked up ASL to communicate with her. We sat in her blue living room, made up of an old coach, a small TV, and a record player.

I moved my fist up and then down. “Yes.”

“How did it go?”

“I don’t know. She’s hard to read. I want to get better at dancing.”

Lavinia laughed. Maybe it was Lavinia, or maybe it was the fact that she was deaf, but she opened her mouth and laughed loudly. She never cared about staying quiet. 

“Good luck!” she signed, her middle finger touching her chin, extending out, and then spelling out “luck.”

I put my hand to my chest and moved it in a circle. “Please. I need your help. I need to get better at dancing.”

“I don’t know how to waltz,” Lavinia signed. 

“I only need a partner.”

Lavinia stood up and reached out her hand to me. I took it, then she led us closer to the record player. She pulled out a Frank Sinatra album, then put it on, a brief moment of static before the needle found the groove for the song, and the brass erupted through the speaker. I’d gotten used to how loud Lavinia listened to the music. Not because she could really hear anything like we did, but the vibrations from the music was her listening, and she needed the volume to be louder to sense the music.

I showed her how we’d learned to hold each other, and then started with the box step. Lavinia learned after a couple of turns what she needed to do in order to do a box step, but I’m the one who still for some reason couldn’t quite get it down, hesitating.

Lavinia let go of me and brought the side of her right hand into the palm of her left. “Stop.”

She gestured me to the record player, then crouched by the speakers. She took my hand and put it on the speaker.

“Feel the music,” she signed. “Feel the beat.”

I did as she said, closing my eyes to focus more on the vibrations coming through the speaker. Lavinia took my other hand and placed it on my heart. The pulse there matched the rhythm of the music moving through my hand, up my arm, and into my body.

I nodded, and Lavinia and I started to waltz again. At time I would trip up, but I’d close my eyes for a moment, connect to the beat again, and start over. When five o’clock came, I thanked Lavinia for helping me and headed back home.

Ma plopped the meatloaf on the counter, followed by some mashed potatoes, then corn, and of course, days-old bread. I knew to wait until after she took what she wanted and I scooped out my own. Growing up, I hadn’t thought I’d miss my brothers when they left home, but these past few months since my middle brother graduated and moved to Chicago, a whole state away, I missed the buffer my brothers had provided.

“Thanks for dinner,” I said as I began to wolf down the mashed potatoes.

“I saw you coming from the dumb girl’s house,” Ma said, “so I know you could have gotten it started.”

“She’s deaf,” I corrected. “And I did the vacuuming today after school before you got home.”

“Well you did a shit job,” Ma said. “There’s dirt all by the kitchen door.”

“I didn’t get around to sweeping, just vacuuming.”

“Nice job half-assing it.” Ma smashed the edge of her fork into the meatloaf way harder than necessary for the already-softened meat. “For the past fourteen years it’s just been all about you, though, hasn’t it? I’m the one with the permanently fucked up sleep schedule, and even though you’re practically an adult, you still act like you’re fucking four.”

I heard a variation of this rant a few times a week. I could never figure out what exactly set her off, as opposed to a quiet evening of ignoring each other. Maybe it had been the dirt in front of the back door that I’d overlooked, or maybe just the fact that I was alive gave my mother enough reason to curse me out. I simply didn’t respond. I’d learned from a young age that reaction of any kind brought more harsh words, and then her fists if she felt impulsive, or the switch if she felt cruel. Ma hated crying and she hated back talk.

I inhaled the rest of my dinner as Ma would interrupt occasionally with a new statement about me, or her brother, or women she was jealous of. I let her rant, I cleared out and cleaned up the dishes, and retreated into my bedroom to do homework until eight o’clock hit and Ma went to bed. I flipped on the TV and watched _I Love Lucy_ followed by _The Andy Griffith Show_. The latter always makes me ache inside, watching Andy and Opie in their perfect little town, with problems that get wrapped up in a half an hour. It makes me wonder what it would have been like, if it had been Ma and not Pops to go. If I would have spent my childhood fishing and being listened to, instead of getting whooped and good at hiding.

One thing’s for sure, though, I’ll make damned certain that any kid of mine gets a childhood like Opie’s.


	2. Unforgettable - Katniss

Miss Seeder had us girls form a circle before the boys got there. Some of the girls talked between themselves as we waited for the boys to come in. Madge had taken her spot next to me, but we didn’t talk. It was one of the nice things about being friends at school with Madge. We didn’t talk if there was nothing to say to each other, but it wasn’t awkward.

But I would be dancing with Peeta soon, and that did make me feel awkward and nervous, two emotions I hardly knew. If any other boy in the whole class had asked me to be his partner, I would have been able to just go through the steps, do the dance, get the grade. Like most things in life, I simply did what needed to be done. Then he had stepped in front of me with his blue eyes and asked to be my partner. Him. 

I’d accepted as Miss Seeder told us to graciously accept whatever boy asked us, even though I would have preferred a partner who hadn’t made me feel like he did. Flustered was the best word I could come up with, difficult for me to decide upon as that word had never been used to describe me. I hadn’t been able to look at him because I didn’t want to feel that way, and catching his blue eyes had brought all of that flooding through my veins.

And I almost could ignore him, if not for the actual waltzing we had to do. He’d asked me again if he could dance with me. And I knew my disposition probably scared him off of doing what every other guy did and just take his partner and start dancing. 

As soon as his hand was in mine, though, large and anchoring, I didn’t hesitate to move closer, placing my hand on his upper arm, cupping his muscle. He secured me with a hand on my shoulder blade, and then he attempted to waltz, klutzy and uneven. And again, I knew that I had hardly done anything to encourage him, to make him feel comfortable with me. So I told him to relax, which he did, and then the song was over, and then I stood under the shower remembering his hands and his eyes.

Peeta had always been a far-away person, someone I kept my eye on, unless I found him looking at me first, and this had been our first substantial contact in eleven years. But in those eleven years, I had known him to be the boy who gave his lunch to another student, who stood up for the bullied, who broke up fights, who learned sign language to talk to the deaf girl on his street. Now I had the chance to know him up close. And I already knew if I did, somehow he’d find a way to burrow even deeper into me and plant himself there.

When there is so little kindness in the world, the goodness that does come through is impossible to let go of.

The boys came through the doors, Peeta among the first of them. I hadn’t prepared to look away, so he caught my eye and smiled, hesitant and small. I couldn’t stop the upward tug of my mouth. He stood in front of me, looking like the perfect all-American boy, with his wavy blond hair, blue eyes, sweet smile, and broad shoulders. 

“Hi Katniss,” he said.

“Hello.” I bit my lip. “How’re you?”

He chuckled. “Hoping I don’t look like a fool for the next hour.”

Coach Chaff gave a big whistle then, and Miss Seeder told them to practice their box step for a song before we moved on. Coach Chaff put the needle on the record, and my stomach clenched as the piano sounded through the speaker. Nat King Cole. I recognized the song and the album. A long time ago it had been played almost every night in my house. Although I hadn’t listened to it for over ten years, the tunes came back to me immediately. I could almost smell my father’s aftershave and the tobacco lingering on his clothes.

Peeta said my name then and I jumped, coming back to the gym. He held out one hand to me, which I took to get in position for the waltz.

“I did practice last night,” Peeta said. 

“With who?” I asked. I knew most boys practiced with their mothers. Just a few months ago my mother had shown Primo how to dance a few basic moves before a Valentine’s dance at his middle school. From what I had seen of Mrs. Mellark, taking time to practice waltzing with her son didn’t seem her type of thing. It was probably why Peeta had gotten so overwhelmed yesterday as other boys seemed to easily pick up the waltzing.

“My neighbor, Lavinia,” Peeta said as he took us through the box step. He certainly had improved, going through the box without tripping up. “She goes to the deaf school in town, but you might have seen her before.”

“Red hair,” I said. I don’t bother to mention how I’ve seen them communicating with their hands at the diner or the Fourth of July celebration. Or that I’ve noticed how pretty she is.

“Yeah, that’s her.” Peeta smiled. “Most people don’t know her until I introduce them.”

“She still goes outside.” I didn’t want to attract any attention to the fact I might have been keeping an eye on Peeta for several years, along with the company he’s kept. Then I spoke a thought out loud as it came to me, “But wait, she’s deaf.”

“Her legs work fine.”

“I know, but isn’t it hard for her?”

Peeta laughed. “She keeps time better than I do. She can feel the vibrations of the music.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

“I didn’t know about that kind of stuff either, until she moved in next door.”

The music stopped, as did the class to wait for Miss Seeder’s next instructions. With Coach Chaff’s help, she showed how to do the natural turn and told us all to space out to practice it. Peeta took my hand as we moved out to widen the circle, and after a bit more personal instruction from Miss Seeder and practice, we had the natural turn down. While Peeta concentrated on getting down the steps, I kept on ear on the music, listening as the piano played out of the record player. Miss Seeder introduced us to the closed change, which she said we’d review tomorrow and practice some more, but that we should try it out.

The period had almost finished up, we had almost made it to Coach Chaff blowing the whistle and telling us to shower off, when the song came out from the record player. My father’s song.

> _Unforgettable_   
>  _That’s what you are._

Peeta’s telling me a story about he and his brothers going diving for golf balls in the golf course’s ponds at night and being run out by a bored police officer—a story that under other circumstances would have made me crack a smile—but the song makes it all too painful to pretend. 

Peeta stops mid-sentence and asks, “Are you okay?”

I nodded, though from Peeta’s raised eyebrow, he’s not convinced. 

“Are you sure?”

“What, just because I’m not entertained by your story?” I asked. “What can I say, I’m a humorless bitch.”

Saying that to Peeta turned out to be equivalent to telling a little kid Santa wasn't real. Even though he kept his face stony, his eyes showed the hurt my words caused him. I turned my face away, though, not wanting to confront the guilt yet while a knife twisted in my gut as the song continued to play.

> _Unforgettable_   
>  _In every way_   
>  _And forevermore_   
>  _That’s how you’ll stay_

My early childhood had been spent dancing with my father. He loved music, so much he could never stay still. Sometimes I watched my parents hold each other close, or I’d be between them. Then Primo came along, and our mother danced with him and my father put my feet on his. 

The night before he left for the war, he’d put on this album, and we’d spent our last night together dancing. Primo, six months old at most, had dozed off halfway through the album, and toward the end I faltered, too. I don’t know how late it actually was, but it seemed like the middle of the night compared to my usual eight o’clock bedtime. Neither of my parents insisted I go to bed yet, and I knew my father was leaving the next day. I clung around his neck even as my feet tired, fighting my drooping eyelids. 

As the last song of Nat’s album played, my father sang it softly in my ear until I couldn’t stay awake a moment more.

> _That’s why darling,_   
>  _It’s incredible,_   
>  _That someone so unforgettable_   
>  _Thinks that I am_   
>  _Unforgettable, too._

After he died, after his body was returned and we put him in the box, I was determined to make sure he would never be forgotten, just like he’d sung to me. But as the years went by, I did forget things. I couldn’t recall the inflections of his voice. I didn’t have specific memories of him, only vague ones, patterns more than events. Even his face slipped from me, held in place by a couple of photographs of him. And I hated it. I hated that I could remember this song better than I could remember him.

“Shower time!” Coach Chaff shouted as the last note hit the piano on the song.

I dropped my hands from Peeta’s and turned away from him. But as I let the water hit my body in the shower, I regretted snapping at Peeta. He hadn’t asked for Nat King Cole to play, didn’t know of the connection to my father or how that song made me feel. And really, if anyone in this school would understand, it would be Peeta.

As I dried off and changed into my regular school clothes, a pit formed in my stomach.

The first time I’d ever known Peeta was at my father’s funeral. Of course everyone in our town showed up, no matter how well they knew him. He’d died in combat, and everyone came to pay their respects to my young widowed mother and her fatherless children.

I had sat in a stuffy black dress throughout the service, where words like “sacrifice” and “greater good” had been used far too many times, and then my mother had forced me to sing for all of them. I just wanted my father back, even if that meant the Commies took over Korea. I didn’t know who the Commies were other than people didn’t like them, and I didn’t know where Korea was. If I couldn’t see the danger, how could it be that my father died for any good reason?

At the wake in our home, I couldn’t stand any more people giving condolences and telling us how proud we should be of my father. I ran away, out the door, and into a small thicket of woods in our backyard. I fell onto a dead pile of leaves under a tree and couldn’t stop sobbing. He was dead, and I didn’t understand why. I would never see my father again, never run my fingers over the calluses from the strings of his guitar. Never make flapjacks and pour on a generous amount of syrup. Never listen to his lullabies as I drifted off to sleep. He was gone, but where did he go? 

That’s when a blond-haired blue-eyed boy approached me, sprawled out on my stomach as I cried into the dirt. He sat down next to me by the tree and didn’t say a word. I glared up at him, ready to tell him to beat it or I’d punch him, when I noticed he was crying unashamedly.

“My pops died, too,” he said simply.

I hadn’t met anyone else who had lost their father, at least not my own age. He was the first person that day that hadn’t told me to be proud of my father, or that time would heal all wounds. He was the only one on that darkest day who had understood.

When I got up and brushed the tears off my face, the boy brought a roll from out of his pocket and gave it to me. I took it, split it in half, and handed him the bigger piece. We ate together, silently, until the boy’s mother came out to the back yard and began screaming for Peeta and threatening a whooping if he didn’t get his ass over there right then. He’d grown stiff and terrified, and ran to his mother’s calling. I winced as his mother gave him a sharp backhand across his cheek. The next time I saw the boy, he had a bruise across his face. A bruise he got for letting me know I wasn't alone.

I had never been able to talk to Peeta after that, but I always noticed him. When the rest of the class made Father’s Day gifts in elementary school, he drew with crayons and I got a head start on my math homework, he made me feel less alone. He didn’t ever have to say anything to me.

So why couldn’t I have just told him the song reminded me of my father and left it at that? 

At least I hadn’t been lying when I told him I was a humorless bitch.

* * *

  
Ripper’s Music and Record Store was possibly the only place I could relax in the entire world. School was a chore, and at home, despite my mother and brother being there, reminded me of everything I had to do to help our single-parent household be a good place for Primo to grow up and be prepared and protected when he left. But at Ripper’s, we had a few repeat customers. Mrs. Undersee, the piano teacher, picking out sheet music for her students. Gale’s bandmates, Thom and Bristel, coming to pick up new guitar strings or drumsticks or get an album from the newest rock band. A couple of kids from school to listen to and sometimes buy albums. Then there were the housewives that came in to pick up an instrument for their kid to learn how to play. Even if I had to talk to people, at least it was about music, a topic I could talk about. And I got paid for ringing up a few people and restocking inventory. The paycheck was the best part of the job, even if it was minimum wage.

Gale had gone back to talk to a mother about a violin for her daughter, which meant I manned the front of the store with all of the records. The bell dinged and two girls who were probably around thirteen came into the store. They had clearly been trying to look older, with pastel blue eyeshadow smeared across their eyelids.

“Excuse me,” one girl said. “Do you have the new Beach Boys album?”

“Yes, right there at the front,” I said, pointing it out. As one of the top bands in the country, we had their newest out and ready for those who popped in to buy the biggest hits and check out. 

Gale came from the back then, one of the violins in his hands. The girls smiled at him as he swooped around behind the counter to ring up the housewife, whose sultry stare and lingering hands were far more forward and suggestive. Gale was handsome, even I couldn’t deny that. Tall and intense gray eyes just below a shag of black hair. I wasn’t surprised when, after the housewife left with a little wave, the girls went to Gale to ring them up instead of me, who had pointed out the album in the first place.

As soon as they left though, Gale shook his head. “Sometimes when I see kids like that coming in and buying Beach Boys, I want to show them the music they should really be listening to.”

“They’re kids,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. Gale walked down the length of the counter until he was right by me.

“Exactly. Listening to stuff like that will put them on the same path as their parents,” Gale said. “Following the ‘American dream’ and all that bullshit.”

Gale’s dad died in a factory accident when Gale was fourteen, and without a union backing his dad, his family didn’t get anything after his death. His mother, a housewife, suddenly had four kids to provide and care for without any type of work experience to her name. Not that Hazelle isn’t a very capable woman, just that she got thrown out without anything to back her up. At least my mother had been a nurse, coming from a family who could afford such training and at a time when it seemed like a patriotic duty, not a slight on her marriage prospects. Gale’s mother had been working at the laundromat for four years, with Gale working at Ripper’s as well, and they barely scraped it together. And now that Gale was eighteen, he had a draft to worry about, too. It made Gale bitter against everything. Marriage, businesses, the government. I certainly couldn’t picture him hanging out at a beach in California, relaxing in the surf or having a real relationship with a girl like the Beach Boys always sang about.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You want them to listen to the Rolling Stones?”

Gale always pushed the Rolling Stone’s album into buyer’s hands. He had formed his own band and covered their songs, and wrote his own to mirror theirs.

“They’re redefining music the way that we should be redefining our lives,” Gale said. I’d heard him say this almost every day, though it wasn’t always to me.

“But you have to work to take care of your family, and I need to work to send Primo to college,” I said. “Neither of us are exactly redefining our lives.”

“If I get my draft letter I will.”

Gale had talked about how he would sit in jail rather than go to Vietnam. How he would show other men that they couldn’t keep on going with the war if they all refused to go. I knew it was pointless to try and go about things that way. Although Primo was fourteen, in another four years he’d be eligible to be drafted, just like Gale was now. Unless I got him to college. Of all the ways to dodge the draft, it was the best option for him. 

“It’s like you want your number to come up,” I said.

“Maybe I do.”

“Then you sit in jail and leave your mother to take care of the rest of your siblings?” 

“Rory’s old enough to work, and Vick will be soon. And changing the way things are, it’s bigger than any one of us, any one family.”

“Don’t be such a dick. You’d really ruin your family to try and make a political point that will just fall flat?”

“Yeah, well I know that you dig that Bob Dylan, so don’t act like you don’t want it, too. At least I’m honest about it.”

The bell rang and Thom and Bristel burst through the door, their eyes alight. Their heads swiveled around until they found Gale and I at the counter and rushed over.

“Gale!” Bristel squealed excitedly. “Guess what?”

Gale raised his eyebrow but didn’t respond.

“We got a gig!” Thom grinned. “A real, honest-to-god gig! It’s over in Victorville, but man, it is a real thing.”

“When? Where?” Gale asked, straightening up and leaning over the counter toward them.

“At a club called The District,” Bristel said. 

Thom began talking over her. “My cousin has an in with the owner, and the band that was going to play on Thursday night canceled because their lead singer has laryngitis, and so we get to be their replacement.”

“Hey, Thursday it’s Victorville, then, Cleveland, and then New York,” Gale said. He turned to me. “Could you close up here on Thursday for me? It’s a two hour drive, and we’ll have to pack up our equipment and everything.”

I nodded. “Go persuade the youth to reject the current culture.”

An actual customer walked through the door and so I left the counter to help them as Gale and his bandmates started to put together a set list. By the time the customer got the Paul Anka album and left, it was time for me to clock out and go home. I said good-bye to Gale and started the walk back home. My mother had to take the car to work, and I wasn’t going to spend any money on even an old junker when there were so many costs to consider if I would send Primo to college for four years. I hoped this war didn’t last for another eight years, but I wasn’t willing to chance that Primo wouldn’t get drafted as a fresh eighteen-year-old in four years. Hell, they could finish up this war and still start another one with all of the tension between the US and the countries going communist. Seemed better to be prepared.

At home, it smelled like red sauce and garlic. Primo, despite taking after our mother’s Irish side with blond hair and blue eyes, had in his cooking favored our paternal grandmother’s Italian. He’d taken over making dinner a couple of years back, and went back to dishes our nonna made for us growing up before she passed.

I came into the kitchen as Primo pulled out garlic bread from the oven. A pot on the stove bubbled with red sauce, round lumps inside indicating meatballs.

“I hope you haven’t spent all afternoon in the kitchen making this,” I said.

“Not all afternoon,” Primo said.

Mother came through the door then, sighing and calling out, “The lack of burning means Primo’s been cooking tonight.”

“It was one time,” I protested as my mother walked into the kitchen.

“Katniss, you should slap a wig on Primo and get him to take your home economics class for you,” my mother said. I glared at her. It was hard enough watching Primo grow up smaller and more sensitive than the rest of the boys his age and how they treated him. I loathed it when Mother joined in on any of it.

Primo flushed. “It just makes sense for me to cook with the both of you working.”

I kissed him on his pink cheeks. “She’s just teasing me, little man.”

He’d grown over the past couple months so that his cheek was now even with my lips. Granted, I was on the petite side even for a female. Pretty soon he’d probably be taller than me, which gave me a pang in my chest. I wished I could keep him small, just for a few more years. Keep him safe through all of the craziness in the world.

We ate our fill of spaghetti and meatballs, then Primo and I worked on our homework before heading off to bed. As I drifted toward sleep, I thought about P.E. and Peeta and how I’d been so rude and stand-offish to him toward the end of class. There were few people who I’d ever considered apologizing to, and fewer I’d decided to actually give an apology. But if anyone deserved one, it would be Peeta.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While in the 1960s the only version of "Unforgettable" that would have been played was by Nat King Cole, this chapter was definitely inspired by the 1990s version of the song by Natalie Cole and her father, Nat King Cole.


	3. Wonderful World - Peeta

I had no idea what I’d done to Katniss the other day. I kept replaying everything, from whether my palms had been sweaty, or if my breath had stunk, or if maybe she thought that diving into golf ponds disrupted some kind of ecosystem. Lavinia had rolled her eyes and told me maybe it was a sign to get over Katniss. But how could I possibly get over her?

A lot of people knew I had a crush on Katniss. Lavinia, Darius, probably anyone at school who paid attention. But I’d never told anyone why. And why it’s so hard for me to “get over” her. Because there had been so many times when I’d tried. When I’d dated another girl or tried to stop looking at her, or interrupt any fantasies of her, I’d only to be drawn to her all over again.

It has been accepted as fact that I was the reason my father was dead. Ma made sure we all knew it, and my brothers let me know it, too, with the way they would chase me down and pummel me, knowing Ma wouldn’t do a thing about it. It still weighs on me to this day, knowing that if not for me, my pops would be alive. Ma would be kinder, and my brothers happier. That burden on a five-year-old, though, is even harder to lift in such a small body. I’ve adjusted to the weight, learned how to carry it, but back then it nearly crushed me every day.

And then I heard about Private Everdeen, about how they were shipping his bullet-ridden body home from some place called Korea and there would be a funeral. Ma told us it was our Christian duty to go to the funeral, even though we hardly knew the Everdeens. David, my brother, told me they had a girl my age, but I had never cared for girls back then, so I didn’t understand the point of going, other than Ma would slap me if I didn’t. 

It was there, sitting in the back of the pews, fidgeting, waiting for it to be over, when the pastor announced that Private Everdeen’s daughter, Katniss, would be singing “The Lord is My Shepherd.” The girl David told me about stood up in front of everyone, the whole town practically, and sang a song about green pastures, still waters, and the shadow of the valley of death. And despite the calming words of comfort and goodness and mercy, she looked so angry at everyone there. Her voice was beautiful—I’m sure the birds stopped to listen to her, falling silent against their competition. But she glared at us all, as if we were the ones who had sent seven bullets through her father’s body. And in her anger, my own anger at my father’s death rose up. Anger at the fire that blazed around our house, anger at my family for placing all of the responsibility on me, anger that Pops was gone and I’d never have another father. My anger that had been squashed down and ignored for so long finally found permission in Katniss Everdeen to wake up.

At the wake, she kept her arms crossed and her face defiant as adults crouched down to talk with her. Then she ran away, out the back kitchen door, and threw herself below a tree in the yard. I already had a roll in my hand, and I crammed it in my pocket. I wanted to go to her, to yell with her about the unfairness of it all, of losing our fathers for no good reason while every other kid had their dad. We would understand each other in that fury.

But as I approached, I noticed her heaving shoulders, the wails of a grieving girl. She was hurt, and I felt it, too. I knew it, I lived with it every day. I was already crying as I sat down next to her against the tree. She turned her dirt-smudge, tear-streaked face up to me, that same expression of anger in her features, when I told her, “My pops died, too.”

That’s all that was said. All that needed to be said. I handed her the roll in my pocket, and she split it in half and gave one-half back to me. Although my mother and brothers had lost Pops, too, Katniss Everdeen had been the only one to understand. How would any other girl compare to her? And it wasn’t just that. She’d become independent and resourceful since then, helping raise her little brother and sticking up for him when other people called him a sissy. No one bullied Primo Everdeen when his sister’s mere existence protected him. I hadn’t heard her sing since the funeral, but sometimes when I walked past the record store, when no one else was in there but Katniss, I saw her strumming a guitar, sometimes jotting down notes. She never cared what anyone at school thought of her, if her clothes were ten years out of fashion and ill-fitting. It didn’t matter, because she didn’t need fashion to make her beautiful.

So how could I just “get over” Katniss Everdeen? I’d have to be dead first.

Still didn’t mean she doesn’t occasionally scare the shit out of me, though. And after yesterday, I’m not sure what to expect from our class today. Darius’s partner waited near Katniss in the circle, so I walked with him and joked about my incredibly embarrassing dancing, even though my stomach hardened with anxiety of having to spend an hour with a sullen Katniss, without knowing what I’d done.

But as I turned to her, she looked a little…sheepish. It was not something I had seen Katniss look like before.

“Hi,” I said cautiously, waiting for her to go back to being upset or disinterested.

“Hi.”

Miss Seeder started the class, telling us to practice what we had learned so far, while Coach Chaff got the record player going, some crooner I didn’t recognize. I held out a hand for Katniss to take, looking down at the floor. She grabbed hold and placed her other hand on my shoulder, and I began to lead her through the box step, completely silent.

“I’m sorry,” Katniss said quickly. I jerked my head forward to look at her, but she stared over my shoulder.

“What?”

“I’m sorry for…for yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s…thanks, I guess.”

“I was just in a bad mood. It wasn’t you.”

She'd been happy, or as close as Katniss got to happy, up until the last few minutes of class, though. I'd been the only person she'd talked to all period.

“Why were you in a bad mood?” I asked.

Finally she looked into my eyes, considering for a moment. My heart thrummed looking at her, having her so close to me, feeling that I was teasing out something secret in her, unknown to anyone else.

“That song, I danced to it with my father the night before he left for Korea,” she said. “'Unforgettable.' That was the song.”

I nodded, understanding. _Unforgettable_. What a horrible reminder for someone who lost a parent so young. “I was three when my father died. Sometimes I think I remember something, but I’m never sure if it was real, or if I just want it to be.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure if something I remembered was real or a dream,” Katniss said. “And I know there are things fading every day. But thinking about him all the time makes me sad, too.”

“Well, at least you have the memory of your last dance with him.” I smiled. I had so few memories of my father, I felt envious of Katniss. She had two more years with her father than I’d had with mine.

“Do you remember very much?” Katniss asked. “You were really young.”

“What I remember most is…how I felt. I was always safe with him,” I said. “Loved, even.”

Miss Seeder walked by then, clearing her throat and said, “Work on that posture you two, you’re getting a little cozy there.”

  
Katniss’s cheeks grew pink as she stepped away, and heat burst onto mine. Had I gotten too close to her, pulled her in so near to me? But even if I did…Katniss hadn’t been the one to say anything about it. Miss Seeder had. Which meant, even if I had been the one leading the way, Katniss had gone along with it. She would have let me know if she didn’t want that, too. Which meant…

Holy hell, I had a shot with Katniss Everdeen.

“Should we practice the turns now?” Katniss asked.

I’d been moving us in a box step the whole time, the only part of the waltz I could do absently enough without thinking too much about the steps. 

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

I didn’t try to pull her in at all, and she didn’t move closer. We moved through the natural and closed turns without speaking. I had to concentrate on the steps, making sure I was leading Katniss through the correct steps. It would be my fault if we failed this unit, as I had to be the one to lead us through the waltz. We didn’t speak much for the rest of the period, except when I messed up and we had to restart, until Coach Chaff called for us to stop and get to the locker rooms.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“See you,” she responded and turned to go toward the girls’ locker room. With her back turned, I let myself stare after her for a moment, her black braid swinging across her back. 

I spent the rest of the day looking forward to the next P.E. period, floating through the rest of my classes, my chores, and a silent dinner with Ma. I spent the evening going through the steps on my own. If I could get them down, I might be able to have a conversation with Katniss again. The first week was almost up, and next week we’d start a new kind of dance and I’d look like an idiot again. I wondered if Lavinia knew how to foxtrot, if I could get a head start this weekend.

The next day, though, I was still struggling the closed turns. Katniss began to sigh when I’d mess up and start over. We weren’t able to talk about much besides the assignment, and how we were supposed to transition between the different steps and changes. The next day would be our test, and while we could do the box step and move into the natural turn, and even the closed turn on its own, the connections between the two still managed to trip me up.

When the period changed to the point in time when we had to head back into the locker room, we were still stuck.

“Are you doing anything at six tonight?” Katniss asked me.

“Not tonight,” I said.

“I work at Ripper’s,” Katniss said. “I’m supposed to be closing tonight, but not a lot of people come in after dinnertime. If you come by, we could practice and get the closed turn down before tomorrow.”

Katniss was inviting me out. My heart pounded, even though I knew it was for an assignment. Still, it was a crack in a door that had been closed for years.

“I can make it there,” I said. Not like I wanted to spend a lot of time with Ma.

She nodded. “See you then.”

We split off after that, but the anticipation continued with me. Outside of school and that gym might change things. There wouldn’t be anyone else there, no bell to ring, no teachers sending us apart.

And _she_ invited _me_. 

After my shower as I dressed, Darius slipped next to me to get to his locker of stuff. 

“You’re happy,” he noted. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you hum before.”

I hadn’t even realized I’d been humming. “Well, it’s a good day.”

* * *

  
I parked my car on Main Street in front of Ripper’s Music and Record Store later that night. A group of three older teenagers left through the front door of the store. I recognized one as Gale Hawthorne. He’d graduated from school a year ago and usually looked angry, so I’d never spoken to him before. He was also the one person I knew Katniss spent time with outside of class, and not just because they worked together. If he didn’t go around with other girls in town, I would have thought they were going steady. As it was, I didn’t think Gale believed in monogamy.

I waited until they passed me and then I got out to go into the store. Katniss sat behind the counter, a newspaper spread out in front of her.

“You sure there’s enough space in here?” I asked her. Between the counter and the rows of records, there was about three feet in width, and another five feet until the counter turned perpendicular and a door led to what must be the back room. Past the records on my left was the music part of the store, with different instruments on the wall and more rows, this time with musical notes and names like _Beginner Piano_ and _Songs from The Music Man_. Sheet music.

“I have to be here until eight,” she said. “So we’ll make it work.”

She hopped from her stool and folded up the newspaper. She ducked below the counter and brought out a record player. 

“You can pick out a record,” she said, waving her hand toward the direction.

I moved over to the records. I didn’t know as much about music outside of what was played on the radio, and I didn’t want to pick out anything bad. I skimmed across a few artists I recognized, others I’d never heard of before, passing Nat King Cole, and landed on Sam Cooke. People liked him, right? He didn’t get mocked like the Beatles with their girly fans, and he hadn’t been making music when Katniss’s father had been alive. I pulled out the album out.

“Sam Cooke okay?” I asked.

“Sure,” Katniss said.

She didn’t crack a smile or frown, only took the record from me and put it in the record player. His upbeat guitar and drum sounded as Katniss came around the counter. As she approached, this situation felt more intimate than the whole rest of the week when we’d practiced at P.E. There were no teachers making us practice, no one else was in the whole store, and Main Street had few people strolling down its sidewalks. No eyes would be peering at us, no one would mark us as absent if we refused to dance together.

So I held out my hand to her, inviting her to the dance. And just like the start of every class, I’m surprised and relieved that she takes my hand and lets me put my hand against her shoulder blade. 

“Okay, so it’s the closed turns that get me,” I said. “Let’s try that slowly?”

She nodded, and I took her through a box step, then into a closed turn, which I could do when I had my head down and eyes on my feet. Miss Seeder had said that each partnership would get the same grade, so if my eyes stayed down, Katniss’s grade would be knocked down, too. I had to be quicker and have my eyes up. There were just so many things to keep track of, and having the heat of Katniss’s body so close to me didn’t help me have a clear mind.

We had to stop when Mrs. Undersee came in. She gave us a curious smile as Katniss jumped back from me and pulled the needle off of the record.

“Mrs. Undersee,” Katniss said. “Has Madge told you about our dancing unit for P.E. unit?”

“She has,” Mrs. Undersee said. “Quite an enjoyable unit, is it?”

“Katniss is being very patient with my two left feet,” I said. Katniss was private, though luckily Mrs. Undersee, despite being the town’s piano teacher, didn’t socialize with the other women of the town, so she was an unlikely source of gossip.

“We have some new sheet music,” Katniss said. “We got most of the music from _The Sound of Music_ like you asked. Do you want me to show you?”

“I’ll look around,” she said. “I’m sure there’s something I haven’t bought from you yet.”

Mrs. Undersee, as the Mayor’s wife, was one of the few women in town who could spend money on most thing without worrying about finances.

“I’ll be here when you’re ready to ring up,” Katniss said and Mrs. Undersee walked back to the music section of the store. She turned to me. “I should be working right now.”

“Do you want me to wait?” I asked. “I think we almost have it, if we just practice a few more times.”

“If you don’t mind.” She headed back around the counter, increasing the distance between us. Clearly she didn’t want anything happening, not even dancing, as long as Mrs. Undersee was in the store.

“You work here with Gale Hawthorne, right?” I asked as I approached the counter and leaned against it. Although I was fairly certain they weren’t going steady, that didn’t mean she didn’t like him or they didn’t have something going on casually.

“Yes,” Katniss said.

“You’re friends with him?”

“I’m not his girl.” She sounded annoyed.

“I didn’t ask that.”

“Everyone wants to know, since we spend so much time together. I figured I’d cut to the point since you were going there anyway.”

I might have been trying to figure that out, but I didn’t want her to think that. “No, I was just going to ask if you play in his band.”

“What?”

“His band. They played at homecoming this year. They used to have four members, but when they played the Sadie Hawkins dance in February there were only three.”

She folded her arms. “Yeah, their bassist got married and started working at the factory. Bristel plays bass from them now, and they just have Gale on the guitar.”

“Well, if you’re friends, why not join his band?” I asked.

“I don’t play their type of music.”

“What type of music do you play?”

She shrugged and turned around to straighten a meager row of candy bars. 

Only a few days ago I’d thought I had broken down Katniss’s wall. She must have rebuilt it up. Or maybe the both of us having dead fathers made that particular one a wall she was willing to open to me.

“I like to draw,” I told her.

She shifted, chin moving parallel to her shoulder. “You’re an artist?”

“Not very good,” I said. “I get books from the library. I got to take one art class at school, too. But, you know, I get it. Art is very personal. Exposing, almost.”

Katniss’s eyes were down, then she flicked them up to me before moving over to the records. She traveled past the G, F, E, and stopped at D. She came back with an album with a woman’s arm strung through a man’s as they walked down the middle of a street. _The Free-Wheelin’ Bob Dylan_. She put the Sam Cooke album back in its sleeve, then put the Bob Dylan record on the record player. I walked the length of the counter to meet her at the record player. 

“He’s my favorite artist,” Katniss said as she put the needle down. I leaned my side against the counter as she rested her back against it.

It seemed like a halfway admission. Bob strummed a couple of chords before his voice came on, simple and folksy. Most people took inspiration from their favorite artists, even if they didn’t plan on copying them exactly. It somewhat surprised me to hear such a mellow sound, but as I listened to the song, I heard the layers in them. Perhaps the sound was simple, but Dylan sung about challenging emotions and ideas, about changes.

“Have you ever seen a William Turner painting?” I asked as the first song ended and the next began to play.

She shook her head.

“He was an artist in the early nineteenth century,” I said. “A volcano had erupted somewhere in…Hawaii or the Philippines or something…but anyway, the volcanic ash made sunsets incredibly vivid and beautiful when he was alive. He painted a lot of sunsets. And a lot of nature, seascapes, and how violent it could be. Somehow he found the beauty in such violent, unpredictable things.”

“Sounds like he never got caught up in the violence,” Katniss said. 

“Probably not directly,” I admitted. “Still, his paintings are beautiful, and they recognize the destruction that exists in life.”

“And you paint sunsets?” she asked, understanding our real conversation.

“I try, but they’re hard to catch before they fade away.”

I try to discern what she’s thinking behind those gray eyes, but all I come back with is how much I want to be with her, just near each other, listening as Bob Dylan plays for us. Then Mrs. Undersee comes back with a couple sheets of new music and Katniss rings her up. 

After Mrs. Undersee leaves, we practice a little more until just before eight o’clock.

“I have to close the store up,” Katniss said, pulling away. My arms feel empty without her. “I think we have it down, though.”

“Do you want me to stay and help you?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Do you have a ride? I could drive you home,” I offered. I know she didn’t have a car.

She chewed the bottom of her lip. “I guess, since it’s getting late…”

She locked up the cash in a safe in the back, locked the register, and I helped her by vacuuming the carpet. Once that’s done she locked up the front door and I showed her to my car, opening the car door for her, which made her blink up at me in surprise.

I let her direct me to where she lives, even though I know already. As I pulled up to her driveway she grabbed her schoolbag and said, “Thanks for the ride. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye, Katniss.”

She got out and hurried up to her house, and I watched to make sure she got inside. Before going through and closing the door, though, she stopped and tilted her head to the side as she looked at me before ducking inside.

I think about her in the porchlight, yellow light in her black hair, features a shadow, halfway inside and outside, as I fall asleep that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "(What A) Wonderful World" by Sam Cooke.   
> And the volcano that erupted was in Indonesia, Mt. Tambora, to clear that up. :)


	4. I'm Not Talking - Katniss

Friday’s P.E. class had been different than the others. Miss Seeder would be grading the partners for girls with the last names A-M and Coach Chaff for N-Z. Girls on one side of the gym’s stadium seats, boys on the other. They both called out the girl’s name and she and her partner would go to their half of the gym, then the record played “Moon River” for each couple to dance to. Audrey Hepburn’s airy voice played over and over again as each partnership went on the floor, danced, and split again.

Our one dance was the only interaction I had with Peeta all day, and we’d barely had an opportunity to say anything to each other. The practicing we’d done the night before turned out to be helpful.

Other than one trip up between the reverse turn and closed turn, we got through it, with Peeta’s ashy blond eyebrows meeting as he concentrated on certain turns. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone try so hard for a P.E. class.

I skipped the shower when class finish. It had mainly been unnecessary this week, but I didn’t see the point at all when I’d sat around and waltzed for all of two minutes. When I finished zipping up my boots, sitting on the locker room bench, Delly Cartwright stood in front of me in her towel.

“Hi Katniss,” she said.

“Hi,” I said. 

“So…you’re Peeta’s partner, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

Delly’s face brightened to a smile. “He’s so nice, isn’t he?”

I nodded. Pointing out Peeta’s nice is like pointing out puppies are cute. Not much of a topic of conversation, as no one could really disagree.

“Do you like him?” Delly asked in a rush.

“Wh-what?” I stammered. Why would Delly think that? _He_ has asked _me_ to be partners. I didn’t go around thinking all the other girls liked their partners. It was a school project, that was it.

“I just want to make sure,” Delly said. 

“No,” I said quickly. “I mean, I like him, but not in that way. He’s…”

What was Peeta? A friend? I didn’t have time for friends. The only reason Gale had made the cut was because we’d been working together for so long. An acquaintance? Somehow, especially after last night, an acquaintance didn’t seem right, either.

“…just my dance partner,” I finished. Though my mind flashed back to Wednesday, when Miss Seeder had pointed out we were dancing too close to each other. 

“Will you talk to him about me next week?” Delly asked

“About what?” I asked.

“The junior prom is in two weeks,” Delly said. “I’ve been hoping Peeta would ask me.”

I’d seen the posters, but as I’d never attended any school events not held during the mandatory school hours, I hadn’t considered it. But Peeta was the type of boy to go to prom. He’d probably get a corsage and sit through a dozen pictures his date’s mother snapped of them. And now he knew how to waltz. I imagined him waltzing with Delly and her wide, friendly smile. For a moment, I disliked Delly, when she’d never given me any reason to.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not good at that sort of stuff.”

“Oh, please?” Delly dropped onto the bench opposite of me. “Last year, I asked Leevy to see if he liked me, but then _they’d_ ended up dating. I know you’re, um, that you don’t…”

“I don’t date?”

She looked sheepish. “Well, yes.”

It didn’t bother me. I’d never understood the appeal of going to a dance or out for a soda with a boy I hardly knew. And with few exceptions, there hadn’t been any boy I’d gotten to know all that well. I’d never wanted to.

“I’ll mention it to him,” I conceded, though the promise didn’t sit right with me. It was too much in the personal business of other people.

“Oh, thank you Katniss!” Delly stood up again. The period was almost over, and she still had to change. I grabbed my bag and headed out of the locker room. Madge waited for me outside. We had U.S. History together next.

“What did Delly want?” Madge asked. Most other students didn’t bother to talk to us. We’d set ourselves apart. Madge had once confided in me she had no interest in boys, that she didn’t want to get married or be in a relationship at all. I was too busy to bother with the time it took to get and maintain a boyfriend, and besides, why fall in love with someone as long as he could go to war? Maybe someday when I was older, but even that seemed like a long shot of working out. But this did take us out of a major part of socialization that had been going on since middle school with our peers.

“She wants me to ask Peeta to ask her to junior prom,” I said.

Madge laughed as we started walking down the linoleum hallway to our next period.

“I know, I tried telling her I’m bad at that type of stuff, but she insisted.” I shrugged.

“No, I’m laughing at how oblivious Delly is about her own crush,” Madge said. “First she doesn’t realize her best friend liked Peeta, and now she doesn’t see that he’s head over heels for you. If it weren’t Delly, that could be a good tactic, actually, getting you to ask.”

“What?” I asked incredulously. “Peeta isn’t head over heels for me.”

“You’re as bad as Delly,” Madge said as we turned into class. Since we never caused any trouble, most teachers let Madge and I sit next to one another. I kept my mouth shut until we sat in our desks.

“He hasn’t spoken a word to me until this P.E. assignment,” I whispered as our classmates settled down.

Madge rolled her eyes at that. “Do you know how weird that is for an outgoing guy like him? He’s so friendly he even learned sign language to talk to his neighbor. But he can’t talk to you unless he’s given a clear excuse?”

“It’s the deaf neighbor he actually likes,” I said. Learning a whole new language to talk to her, her pretty face and deep red hair, his practicing his waltzing with her, all the time they spent together.

“If you say so,” Madge said.

Our teacher started class then, but I wanted the subject dropped anyway. As the teacher lectured about the first world war, showing slides of the trenches and gas masks and destroyed land, my gaze fell down to my notebooks, where I started to sketch a sunset so I wouldn’t have to look at those images. I wasn’t a great artist, and I only had a pencil to work with, so it was only a half-circle with lines of shading surrounding it. Still, I could see what Peeta meant about sunsets being difficult to paint. 

After school, I went to work. No one else was in the store except for Gale.

“Hey,” I said as I headed to the back to put away my school bag. “How was your show last night?”

“Incredible,” Gale said. He waited until I stored my bag and then told me all about it. 

Although I’d heard the Hawthorne name, I hadn’t met Gale until I was fourteen and he was sixteen. I was old enough to work at that time. Mother’s job made enough for us to have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and heat in the winter, but I knew we’d need more if we were going to have any sort of future. At the time, the Vietnam War was new and Primo so young. The thought of him ever being drafted hadn’t crossed my mind, but college for the both of us had. 

I spent enough time at Ripper’s listening to the records there, since I hardly ever indulged in actually buying one, that Ripper brought me on the same time she hired Gale. When we went in to be trained, he’d raised an eyebrow at me and asked, “I’m going to be in charge of her, right?”

I’m small, and at that age I especially still appeared to be a child, with a flat chest and narrow hips. I lifted my chin up and said, “Actually, I was hired to supervise you.”

It wasn’t true, but Gale laughed and Ripper shook her head at the both of us. We’d spent every day after school together working in the store. There would be stretches of time when no one came in, and Gale liked to talk. We lived in a small town in the Midwest, which meant a lot of conservative views. Even that early on, Gale and I hated the war. Everyone else said we were helping stop the spread of Communism. We were helping the Vietnamese have the same opportunities that we had in our free economy. Gale had his problems with the free economy. That didn’t bother me as much as sending people to die in a faraway land, and meddling in other countries' decisions. We discussed this, and music, and anything affecting society, although anything outside of the war was more Gale’s forte more than mine. While we didn’t always agree, our own views usually differed from everyone else in the town, which had drawn us together as friends.

“And the club’s manager has gone to London,” Gale was telling me. “He’s heard all of the bands coming up there, plus their popular bands. Here, look what he lent me.”

He held out an album _Five Live Yardbirds_ with a group of men behind some sort of wrought iron gate. 

“I don’t know them,” I said.

“I know, this record was only released in the UK,” Gale said. “They have an album coming out in a couple months here. I’m going to tell Ripper to order a couple of copies. Here, I want you to listen to it.”

He slid out the record to put on the turntable.

“If he lent the record to you, does that mean you’ll be going back?” I asked.

“Yes, we’re scheduled for another show in a couple weeks,” Gale said. “They were booked out for a while, but after that we should be playing there once a week.”

“That’s great,” I said. 

“It is,” Gale agreed. “Only I have a favor to ask.”

“Another one? Already?” Gale and I had a similar stubborn streak. We didn’t like to ask for help about anything.

“I’m thinking this gig will open up more opportunities for us,” Gale said. “Only problem is, for right now, all of the time slots open for our band don’t start until around midnight, then we have to play, and pack up, and drive back home. I was thinking that over the summer, maybe you could switch me shifts and take the morning? I’ll be here by two and close up.”

“I was planning on taking the morning shift at the pool,” I said. “But I’ll talk to my supervisor and see if I can get the afternoon shift instead.”

Gale grinned at me. “Thanks, Catnip. And hey, once I make all the connections in the biz I’ll hook you up.”

“No thanks,” I said. Gale worked here long enough to catch me strumming a few chords and jotting down a few lyrics. He’d never heard me play, though. And while Gale thrived off of the attention on stage, my music had always been meant for me. Because for all of the times I was sure, sometimes I wasn’t, and putting it to music always helped. Or what I did know that I felt was no one’s business but my own.

“You’re depriving the world,” he said. “I know your thoughts, and to not share that message will make this world worse.”

I raised an eyebrow at him, confused about the look he gave me, serious and close. I didn’t bother to tell him that he might know my thoughts, but he didn’t know my heart. No one did. And that’s why no one could hear my songs.

I pointed to the record player. “They’re good.”

Gale sighed. “Yeah.”

The day moved on. Kids came in after school, stopping by before going to Greasy Sae’s diner and to start off their weekend. Gale’s girl of the week stopped by to confirm their plans for the night, and then I left at six.

Primo had made dinner, carbonara, and then Mother gave me the car to take to the drive-in. It was a tradition Primo and I had for several years now. Before I could drive, it was the movie theaters, but now we liked the drive-in. We could talk if we wanted, or at least not be bothered by other people. I knew other people took their dates to the drive-in, but Primo was the only “date” I needed.

Elvis’s new movie, _Girl Happy_ was playing that night. It wasn’t my favorite type of movie, but Primo was never picky with his movies. He enjoyed almost anything. So I watched Elvis get into shenanigans and romance a pretty blonde and sing to her about being her puppet.

“Will you ever cut your hair Katniss?” Primo asked once during the movie.

Nearly all of the girls in the movie had chin-length hair, though given how much they had teased and back-combed it to stand up high, it was probably actually longer. It wasn’t fashionable to have long hair, and most girls my age had chopped the braids from their hair a couple years ago. I had simple moved mine from two braids into one.

“I don’t have any plans to,” I said. I had never been one to care about trends or how I look. Fashion was unnecessary. Madge told me about how she had to wash and set her hair each Saturday nigh, and re-pin them each night so they kept their shape. My long hair was much easier to deal with. “Besides, I’d have to use everything I earn at Ripper’s to buy all of the hair spray I’d need to get my hair to look like that.”

“You can you know,” Primo said. “Use your money for new clothes, or hair spray or make-up.”

I laughed. “I’m okay, Primo. Really.”

“You don’t want to wear what the other girls are wearing?”

I sighed. Primo had always been highly considerate of others, though when it came to me, his consideration of me focused on fitting in with the other girls. Probably because I made sure he and Mother had what they needed and wanted first, and I made do with the leftovers. 

“Why can’t you believe I’m content with how I am?” I asked. 

“I don’t understand it, I guess.”

I ruffled his hair. “You’re the normal one. Most teenagers want to be like everyone else. It’s just who I am to not care.”

Primo turned his attention back to the movie, mouth pulled down. I wished I could give him some of the acceptance about myself to him. I’d observed my peers going through similar feelings, and while a few years ago I had rolled my eyes at them, watching Primo go through it made me more sympathetic now. 

I’d come to realize that everyone else simply cared, and I didn’t. Other than Primo, and protecting him from the world, I didn’t care about anything else. I couldn’t care about anything else. Because as much as people described me as strong, I had known truth deep inside me from the time the news came of my father’s death, which was that I was weak. And the weak could only be strong when they had nothing to lose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song: I'm Not Talking by the Yardbirds.


	5. I'm Happy Just to Dance with You - Peeta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! This is a short one, but I wanted to get something up. I've been busy this past week taking care of some sick family members (not COVID, it's a chronic thing) and getting ready to start my master's program tomorrow (!!!) My priority will obviously be going toward my studies so I won't be updating as frequently. My goal is to update at least once a month, though. :)  
> I've also put a link to my Spotify playlist for this fic to my profile. After the first song, it's in order of the chapters so far. Once it's reached the current chapter, it's completely random, and a mix of songs I have plans to use for future chapters and others that are there to fill it out as I listen to it as I write. I'll be updating its order with each chapter I post. If you ever have some 60s songs/bands you think I should check out, let me know!

Monday we started our last week of the dance unit, and the last week I had to establish something between Katniss and I. For a girl who could count her friends on one hand, I thought last week had been a good foundation to lay, but was it enough to get us in the direction I wanted this to go? Summer vacation was a little over a month away, and that break in having to be at school at the same time killed off actual friendships for the three month break.

Miss Seeder and Coach Chaff demonstrated the basic steps for foxtrot to us, and most of the period was used for instruction, so Katniss and I didn’t have much time to talk to each other. Learning the waltz last week had helped me get into the right mindset for dancing. Still, maybe if I struggled with this again she would suggest we practice after school? No, I wanted a relationship outside of a school assignment. Which meant one thing, really. I had to ask Katniss on an actual date by the end of the week.

As the period finished up, I lost any nerve to ask Katniss out. We still had the rest of the week, and if she turned me down I didn’t want four more awkward days in P.E. I watched as Delly Cartwright joined Katniss in walking to the girls’ locker room, and wondered how to go about asking her out. It was a far more treacherous prospect than asking her to be my dance partner for a school assignment.

However, the opportunity presented itself without my planning it the next day. I had been asking Katniss questions during our P.E. period to figure out what else exactly she liked. That list, however, seemed limited to music and Primo. Over the weekend all she’d done was go to the movies with Primo and work her weekend waitress job at Greasy Sae’s diner. Figuring out a date related to Primo was out of the question, as I think that probably disqualified it from being a date. She worked at the only place in town that had anything to do with music, and I didn’t want to scare her off with an hours-long road trip to the next major town that might have anything music-related. I knew that she had been working as a lifeguard the past couple of summers as well, but since Memorial Day hadn’t come yet, there was nothing water-based to do. And just because it was her job didn’t mean she wanted to do it in her free time.

As Darius talked to me in the locker room about which girl he should ask to junior prom, weighing the likelihood of being turned down with the attractiveness of each girl, I wondered if this could possibly be my answer. I had planned on asking Lavinia, since this time around I didn’t have a girlfriend already, and she sounded jealous of the dances our school had. Her school had so few students it wasn’t an activity the school thought worthwhile to put on. I hadn’t asked her, though, and she’d be happy for me if Katniss agreed to go with me.

I wondered about this as I headed out of the locker room, ready to head to my chemistry class when I noticed Katniss waiting against the wall directly in front of the locker room door. She caught my eye and waved at me, which was enough to draw me toward her. She’d never done this before, seeking me out. My palms tingled as I closed the distance.

“Hi,” I said. “Did you need something from me?”

“Uh, yeah.” Her gaze fell down to the history textbook in her arms. “Sorry, this is sort of…I’m not sure how to ask it…”

“It’s fine,” I said. “What is it?”

“Have you asked anyone to junior prom?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I said. I’d never heard of a girl asking out a boy other than for the Sadie Hawkins dance, but Katniss had said she had to ask me something, and she looked uncomfortable now, her arms tightly clutching her books, avoiding my stare.

“Would you go with me?” I asked, words spilling out before I could think them through. I’d been so overwhelmed with the idea of Katniss wanting to ask me, but being too nervous to get the words out, that the usual paralyzing fear and analysis fell away.

“What?” Katniss asked in surprise, her widened eyes snapping up to mine.

“Would you go to junior prom with me?” I tried to stay calm she she didn’t answer my question. If she said no and we had three more days of class, I might need to move to another town. State, even.

“I wouldn’t have anything to wear to it,” she said. 

“Maybe Madge has something you could borrow?” I asked. Madge had to go to boring adult parties because of her father being the mayor, and they were friends. Still, if she were asking me, wouldn't she have at least thought through any obstacles?

Katniss shook her head. “I’m sorry, I was here to see if you’d ask another girl. She wanted me to ask you to ask her to the prom.”

“I thought you were trying to ask me,” I said. “That’s why I…”

“Oh.”

We looked away from one another.

Well, we were here. It was laid out and I couldn’t take it back, so I had to lean into it. “Do you want to go with me?”

“I was supposed to get you to ask Delly Cartwright.”

“Except she’s friends with Leevy, which means I’d spend the whole night with my ex-girlfriend.” That was one reason I didn’t want to go with Delly. I did like her well enough, but if Katniss turned me down I’d ask Lavinia. No potential disaster laid in going with my neighbor.

“Right.”

Neither of us talked as the two-minute bell rang. My chemistry class was across on the other side of the school, but I’d take a tardy, or an absence if it took her this long to answer me. It did seem to startle Katniss, though.

“Can we go as…dance partners?” she asked.

“Um, if that’s what you want, but what does that mean?” 

“You know, Delly really likes you, and if I get like…a… _date_ with you, I think it would hurt her feelings,” Katniss said.

“How about as friends?” I asked. It was disappointing, but maybe she was thinking of Delly. 

Her shoulders slackened and grip on her history book relaxed. “Okay. Friends.”

She blinked a few times, then hurried away from me. I followed after, a little in shock of what just happened. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. She’d agreed to ask me to ask out Delly Cartwright. If another guy had asked that of me toward Katniss, what would I have done? Not essentially ask her out for him, certainly. Maybe that should have been answer enough for me, but the couple of times she’d opened the gate protecting her for me to join her for a little while, made me hold onto hope. I just needed more time with her, more opportunities to be let in.

Junior prom might not be a night of romance for Katniss and I, but I could wait for that. Right now, I was just glad she had said yes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" by the Beatles.


	6. Katniss - Turn! Turn! Turn!

I couldn’t figure out why I had said yes to Peeta. I puzzled over it as I sank into my seat next to Madge for our history class. She raised an eyebrow at me, but the teacher had started class already, so I shook my head.

I hadn’t known what came over me. I’d waited there, dreading asking Peeta to take Delly to the prom, and then he asked me instead, and I could suddenly picture myself with the corsage and the pictures and the slow dancing, and Peeta, his face in front of me, his hand on my waist. So many things pulled me back. The dress, Delly, the fact that I did not date, and wouldn’t this be a date?

But I couldn’t say no to him, to Peeta, with his hopeful blue eyes flicking to mine and away again. The way he’d waited through the long silences for me to answer. I imagined having to watch his face fall as I turned him down and the awkwardness of the next three P.E. classes after doing so. I’d tried to wrestle a compromise, a friendship out of it. That would take care of my aversion to dating. The other two I’d set aside while the time pressed on me to answer.

As class wrapped up and the sound of books slamming and papers shuffling overtook the room, Madge asked me, “So is he going to ask her?”

“No,” I said simply. I didn’t want to tell Madge about the fact that Peeta had asked me and I’d accepted. Maybe I should get out of it, do it soon before anyone found out and heard I took back my yes. I could tell him I had to watch Primo that night, or work. But Primo is fourteen and Ripper’s closes at eight.

“Yikes. Did he ask someone else?” Madge asked, standing up from her desk.

“He said it would be weird spending the evening with Delly and Leevy,” I said.

“That makes sense.”

Madge and I had different classes for our last period, and in my solitary trek, I figured I’d have to cancel on Peeta. He only asked me because he thought I was going to ask him, and guys always had to take control of stuff like asking out on dates. He’d find someone else to go with.

Only I didn’t see him after school, and I had to go to work and didn’t have time to look for him. I wanted to catch him soon, before he told anyone we were going together. So at work, I pulled out the yellow pages and looked up the Mellark phone line. If the witch answered, I’d hang up. If Peeta asked, I’d let him know I couldn’t make it anymore, but thank him for the invitation.

When Gale took his fifteen minute break when I got there, I called the Mellark home but no one answered. I tried twice more, but didn’t get anyone.

After three unsuccessful tries at reaching Peeta, I called home the next time. Mother would be gone, but Primo would be there diligently working on his homework. I waited until Gale had started working with a customer, an older man who decided to pursue his dream of learning to play the guitar after his wife passed. He’d taken ten minutes to describe what we could help him with, so I figured Gale would be stuck with him a while.

Primo picked up the phone with, “Hello, this is the Everdeens.”

“Hey little man,” I said.

“Hey!”

“Do we need more eggs for breakfast for tomorrow? I can run to the store after work.”

“Yeah, we need that and some bread for sandwiches.”

“Great, I’ll pick that up.”

“Do you have anything else to tell me?”

I paused, thinking. “No.”

“Really?”

“Do you have something to tell me?”

“I know that you’re going to the prom with Peeta Mellark.”

“What?” I hissed into the receiver.` “Where did you hear that?”

“Rory Hawthorne was going into the boy’s locker room and heard you two. He told me.”

Dammit. Those Hawthornes were as silent as foxes, even on linoleum. And my brain had been too overloaded to pick up on Rory being near enough to hear our conversation.

“Look, I’ll probably have to cancel anyway. You don’t think Rory told anyone else do you?”

“What? Why would you do that?” Primo asked, his voice rising in distress.

“It’s silly.”

“Why? Because it’s fun?”

“It’s just not important.”

“It is to me!” Primo said. “Katniss, you haven’t done anything normal for your age since Nonna died. You’ve been all about working and nothing else, and you’re at the end of your junior year! And I know you’re doing it for me. It makes me feel so guilty.”

“I wouldn’t be going anyway. He just caught me by surprise.”

“Well you should go,” Primo said. “How can you know you’ll hate it if you’ve never been before?”

I sighed, resting my elbow on the counter to prop my hand up to rub my temple. Primo didn’t often get confrontational, but when he did, he became passionate about it.

“You like music, and dancing,” Primo pressed. “And Peeta’s probably the most well-liked boys in your grade. It’s your turn to have fun.”

I thought I would have more time with Primo, but the customer and Gale walked back from the instrument section of the store, the man leaving empty-handed and Gale right across from me, straightening out some of the records that had gotten askew.

“I’ll have to call Madge to see if I can borrow a dress,” I said. If going to a dance with Peeta Mellark for an evening would make Primo happy, I could do it. Hell, maybe I could have some fun. For Primo’s sake.

“Really?” Primo asked.

“Yeah, and don’t gloat about it.”

“I won’t!”

“Okay, well, I’ll see you later tonight.”

“Bye!”

I hung up the phone and said to Gale, “That customer was out quick.”

“His passion to learn the guitar disappeared when he saw the price tag but still felt it important to share with me all about his finances,” Gale said, his back to me as he straightened out the records. “You’re borrowing a dress from Madge Undersee?”

Gale didn’t like the government, so he didn’t like the mayor. I understood his hatred for the government that sent off young men to die in a war, but disdain for the mayoral office and anyone associated didn’t track for me. Besides, Mrs. Undersee likely paid our salaries with all the money she spent at Ripper’s.

“Yes. I know you think I’m a guy, but I actually am a female, and females often wear dresses.”

“That’s not…it’s just, why would you need a dress?”

I paused. I didn’t want to tell Gale, but his band had been hired weeks ago to play, so he’d see me there anyway. And after my phone call with Primo, I wasn’t going to be able to back out. “I’m going to junior prom.”

“What? Why are you doing that?” His voice was full of contempt.

“I’m sorry, is going to a school dance now part of everything you’re crusading against?” I asked. “Because last time I checked, you were going to be playing your music there.”

“Yeah, to open up the narrow minds of the kids in the town,” Gale said. “You don’t need to go. You already have an open mind.”

“Why are you being such an ass?” I asked. I grabbed a pack of gum from the counter and threw it at him. It hit him square in the chest, as I’d intended. That fact gave me a bit of satisfaction.

“Is Madge making you go?” Gale asked.

“No one is _making_ me go.”

“Then why are you going?”

“Because Peeta Mellark asked me and I said yes.” I was practically shouting at Gale by this point, so frustrated by his fixation on me going to a dumb dance. I knew it wasn’t my type of thing, but why the hell did it matter so much to him? Did he really think that if I went I was somehow causing the damn draft?

“Peeta Mellark?” Gale asked, his face twisting in disgust. 

“Yeah, David Mellark’s younger brother?” David was Gale’s age. 

“I know who golden-boy Peeta Mellark is,” Gale said. “I had no idea you had a thing for the White House’s wet dream of the ideal American boy.”

“You don’t know him,” I said. “And I don’t have a thing for him.”

“I know he’s a football player, a former boy scout, and looks like Hitler’s plans for the human race.”

He was also an artist, and a fellow fatherless child, and somehow despite his witch of a mother, the kindest person I’d ever known. I didn’t tell Gale this. I wanted to keep this Peeta I knew protected from Gale’s hatred that could somehow never be satisfied.

“Like I said, you don’t know him.”

“He’s the kind of person who will keep marching to the orders given to him,” Gale said. “I can’t believe you want to spend a whole evening with someone like that.”

“Right, because the girls you spend your time with are such free thinkers.” The hypocrisy rolling off of him right now was maddening. Gale and I had gotten into some debates before, but nothing like this.

“I am getting those girls to buck the traditions that expect them to stay pure until they marry a guy who will bore them in bed,” Gale said. “You’re going to some school dance with a guy who will propose marriage to the first girl he sticks his dick in. So yeah, there’s a difference.”

“You’re full of shit sometimes, you know that?” I asked, my cheeks growing hot now that he’s brought sex into it. For someone whose mother was sure to tell her where exactly babies came from and whose best friend had slept with half of the women in the town, the topic still made me supremely uncomfortable, and Gale knew it. 

“I’m awake to all of the shit in this world,” Gale said. “And I thought you were too, but apparently not.”

“Nope, I guess you can take me from your clump of people who are right into your much larger clump of people who are wrong,” I said. I stood up and went into the back room to get away from Gale.

He might be the closest friend I had, but his black-and-white thinking drove me crazy sometimes. And he didn’t seem to realize that when he pushed on me so hard, it actually sent me off in the direction he didn’t want me to go in.

I sat down at Ripper’s desk and snapped a couple of pencils in frustration before letting the anger simmer to the point where I could work with Gale in silence for the rest of the night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If any of you are Gale fans, sorry to do this to a character you like. I'm actually pretty cool with Gale in the books for the most part, but this 1960s Gale is different without the Capitol censoring him. And of course he's pissed because he likes Katniss and is just covering that up.  
> Chapter title is a song originally by the Limeliters but made famous by The Byrds. Lots of others have covered the song, like most songs from this era of time. :)  
> Next up: Katniss and Peeta attend junior prom together! :D


	7. I Saw Her Standing There: Peeta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Sorry this update took like three months to do. Shortly after I posted the last chapter, there was a family emergency, and so now on top of a full-time Master's program I am a part-time caregiver (and a part-time employee). I'm now on break so I hope to have a little more time to write. Thanks for your patience, and now: prom!  
> TW: abuse, child abuse, blood.

It had been years since I’d knocked on Lavinia’s door. Instead, I opened it and peered around the corner to the living room where Lavinia usually sat. The day of junior prom, I did the same thing as usual and waved at her with the hand not holding the cardboard box with Katniss’s corsage inside.

She smiled at me when I came in and signed, “What’s that?”

I put my fingers together and touched the apple of my right cheek and then in the same place on the left side. “Flowers. For Katniss.”

“Right. That’s today.” Lavinia’s smile became plastic. She’d been disappointed when I’d told her Katniss agreed to go with me, and I did feel bad about letting her down. But this could be my only chance at having a kind-of-date with Katniss.

“Can I put it in your fridge?” I asked. “My ma doesn’t know I’m going tonight.”

She moved her fist up and then down. “Yes.”

“Thank you.”

I disappeared to the back of the house and stuck the flowers in the fridge. When I got back and sat in the chair across from Lavinia’s seat on the couch.

“Hey,” she signed. “Maybe this summer we can go out to another dance.”

“That sounds like fun,” I said. “Maybe if things go well with Katniss tonight, we can all go out. I’ll invite Darius for you.”

Lavinia shrugged. “He doesn’t sign.”

“He…tries,” I said. “Just as long as he doesn’t get hungry.”

Lavinia did laugh at that and turned pink. Once, when we were thirteen, I brought Darius around to try and help Lavinia make another hearing friend. I taught him a couple of signs before and basic grammar rules of ASL. Meeting up at Greasy Sae’s Diner, Lavinia asked Darius how he was doing, and he positioned his hand in a C shape and ran it down his throat, which was fine, until he repeated it two more times. He’d thought he was expressing how very hungry he was. He had actually been telling us he was horny.

“Well, I have to get back and get my suit ready for tonight,” I said. “I’ll come around seven to pick up the flowers.”

“Ok. See you tonight.”

Back at home, Ma had another one of her days. As I came through the kitchen door she yelled at me, “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me we don’t have any potatoes?”

A chicken had been de-boned and sat in an oven pan, dressed with butter and rosemary, my mother still holding a knife as she cut up carrots to throw in the pan with the chicken. I never liked it when Ma got angry holding anything. Knives made me nervous most of all.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Bullshit. I raised two boys before you. You kind eat everything,” Ma said. “Especially you. Greedy pigs, eating all my food, taking all of my money.”

The phone began to ring, coming from the living room and giving me my escape. “Here, I’ll get that.”

I chanced crossing the kitchen to get to the other side of the house where the phone rang.

“Mellark residence.”

“Oh good, Peeta, it’s you!” A familiar voice came from the other end. My oldest brother, Paul.

“Oh. Hey, Paul,” I said. Paul had moved to Columbus a couple years ago and settled down. He’d had his first kid last fall, a little girl named Susie. We’d never been close growing up, to put it lightly, and the distance didn’t help. I had no idea why he was calling me. 

“I just wanted to say happy birthday,” Paul said. “Seventeen, huh? Man, you enjoy that while you can.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said, surprised. I couldn’t really think of my birthday ever being acknowledged in this house, or by Paul since he moved away six years ago. Granted, Paul was late, but still. If he called in October I’d have been surprised he was even bothering to reach out to me.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything for your birthday. Do you have plans?”

“Um,” I said. “I did. It was last Saturday. Lavinia made me a cake. I hung out with her most of the day.”

“Shit. Your birthday isn’t today?”

“Nope. April twenty-fourth.”

“Sorry, Peeta, shit.”

“Hey, you got the right month,” I said. “If you’d called tomorrow then I’d be insulted.”

The joke might have lightened the conversation between acquaintances, maybe even friends, but I didn’t know if even I could lift up this heavy of a history.

“Lavinia, huh? Is that your girlfriend?” Paul tried to lift it up anyway.

“No, that’s the deaf girl next door, remember?”

“Yeah, I guess it’s been a long time since I’ve been home.”

“I don’t blame you.”

We were silent. The only thing we’d ever really had in common was our family tree, which wasn’t the happiest thing to share for us. Well, that and wrestling, but wrestling with Paul just reminded me of getting pinned and punched by brothers two and five years older than me.

“Well, thanks for calling,” I said. “I, uh, I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome.”

“Do you want to talk to Ma?”

Paul answered quickly. “No.”

“Again, I don’t blame you.”

“Okay, well, bye.”

“Bye.”

I hung up the phone and headed upstairs to iron my suit for the dance tonight. It was just my church suit, handed down from Paul to David to me. Once I had my suit prepped, I headed down to the kitchen for dinner, hoping Ma had gotten over the lack of the potatoes. 

Ma was pulling out the roast as I pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen. She tugged off her oven mitts and asked me, “Anyone important on the phone?”

“It was just Paul.” I crossed to the other side of the kitchen to get the table set for dinner, both to look productive and create distance between us.

“Paul?”

“Yeah, he just wanted to check in.” I didn’t mention my birthday. If I did, she’d think I was complaining that she’d forgotten, and then I’d get it from her about how I should be grateful she kept me alive to have any sort of birthday.

“And why didn’t he talk to me?”

“I’m, uh, I’m not sure.”

I kept a nervous eye on her as I put forks and knives on the table, never completely turning my back to where she stood in front of the oven. I didn’t dare move to the cupboard to get the glasses.

“Well why would he call here and not want to talk to his mother?”

“I just don’t think he had time to talk for very long.”

“But he called here. You must have talked for at least a while.”

“Maybe for five minutes. It wasn’t very long.”

“Long enough for you to get me so I could talk to my son.” Her eyes flashed with familiar danger, pink spots growing on her cheeks.

Ma blocked the way out to the living room. The door to the backyard was equidistant between the two of us.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get you,” I said.

“You say that a lot. But the problem with you, Peeta, is you _never fucking think_ so that no apology is even needed.” Ma grabbed a wooden spoon sitting on the counter. 

I lunged forward for the door, but Ma wasn’t happy to just intimidate me today. She rushed after me, spoon raised above her head as my hand grasped the door handle. I could have gotten out, but she’d locked the door at some point, and my twisting of the handle met resistance. As I undid the lock, the spoon made contact with my mouth, and the taste of blood hit my tongue. Ma got in one more whack on the back of my head as I finally freed the door and ran outside.

“You fucking coward!” Ma shouted. “Always fucking running away like a fucking pussy!”

Blood pounded in my ears and on the back of my head where she hit me as I sprinted out of our yard and into Lavinia’s. I raised a hand to my lip, blood spilling out onto my palm. My fingers became slippery, and I took care to open Lavinia’s back door with my clean hand. 

No matter how many times Ma had an episode like that, I still trembled as I moved through Lavinia’s kitchen, rinsing off blood in her sink or finding a frozen steak to put on a fresh bruise. And just as in all the other times, Lavinia came into her kitchen, the vibration of the slam of the door alerting her to my presence. 

As I scrubbed the blood off my hands, Lavinia pulled out a clean towel and got some ice from the freezer. She moved side-by-side to me by the sink and raised the towel to my lip. Once my hand was clean, I took hold of it.

“The bitch?” Lavinia asked, eyebrows raised.

I nodded.

Normally, I stayed with Lavinia and her parents, fresh off of their jobs at the factory, the older pair silently ignoring any injury visible to me. Today, though, today I had a kind-of-date with the girl I’d been waiting for since I was five years old. 

“My suit’s in my house,” I signed awkwardly, one handed. Lavinia understood, though.

“Can you sneak back in?”

“If she catches me, I’m dead.”

Lavinia chewed on her lip. I look down at my blue polo shirt with dark spots on the chest, trousers, and loafers. Nowhere near the type of look I’d need to pull off taking Katniss to prom. But what could I do? Ma didn’t go to bed until eight. I did have my keys and wallet on me, as I’d learned years ago to always have them in my pocket while Ma was home, but nowhere near enough money to go to the store and buy a new suit.

“Come on Cinderella,” Lavinia signed. “Tonight I’m your fairy godmother.”

* * *

Standing in front of Katniss’s door, I shifted in the suit Lavinia had gotten me from her dad’s closet. It was her dad’s only suit, reserved for weddings and funerals. He was taller than me, so Lavinia had pinned the hem of the pants, but I would just have to deal with the long sleeves. I still wore my loafers, but thankfully they were black, which made me hope they would blend in with the rest of the ensemble. If I could only hide the split lip, I might be able to pass for a normal guy going to prom.

Holding the cardboard box with Katniss’s corsage, I raised my hand to knock. I heard quick footsteps approach and Katniss’s brother opened the door. He stood a head shorter than me, his blond hair combed neatly to the side. 

“Hi Peeta,” he said enthusiastically. Then his eyes fell on my lip. “Oh no, are you okay? What happened?”

“I hit my lip on an open cabinet door,” I lied. “Right on the corner.”

“Hmm, doesn’t look like it would need stitches,” Primo said. “My mother could check it out for you, though.”

“That’s okay, I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “But thank you for the offer.”

“Sorry, come on in. I’ll go get Katniss, she should be ready by now.”

He opened the door wider and stepped aside for me to come in. I stood at the entrance of the living room while Primo headed down the hallway. It didn’t seem as if the house had been updated for two decades, with the green and mauve flowered wallpaper and dark wood chairs and end tables. Photographs lined the fireplace mantle. One of a petite blonde marrying a black-haired man, then of a chubby baby, the couple and baby in front of the house, and another baby, and then the man dressed in a military uniform. It was the story of the Everdeen family, and it stopped with the patriarch still alive.

Primo appeared from the back, followed by his mother. “She’s coming!”

I lifted my head nervously, almost expecting to wake up from this dream. But then Katniss came out from the hallway. Her dress had large pink, orange, and white flowers on a green background with a white sash settled right below her chest. Her long hair had been let down, half in a large bump and the rest left down, making me want to run my fingers through her silky tresses. Her gloved hands interlaced and twisted around as her black-lined eyes turned up to meet me.

“Wow, Katniss, you look…” I struggled to think of the right words. Nothing seemed to fit right, so I settled with, “beautiful.”

She gave a nervous smile. “Thank you.”

I held up the box. “I have a corsage for you.”

“Oh, right, I have one for you, too.”

“I’ll go get it!” Primo zipped away through a door.

Katniss and I met halfway, and I showed her the corsage of white roses. As her gaze fell down to look at them, I noticed her stare lingering on my mouth, eyebrows furrowing. Without the cut, I would have gotten excited, but it just made me run over the cover-up in my head again, to be sure I matched up what I told Primo.

“It’s nice,” Katniss said. “Thank you.”

Primo came back out with a box and waited. I could sense Mrs. Everdeen’s and Primo’s anticipation at this event. I know Katniss had never been to any dance I’d gone to, and I got the sense this might be the first thing outside of providing for her family that she’d done in years. 

When Mrs. Everdeen whipped out a camera and put a fresh flashcube in the top, a strange caving in of my chest took me over. What would it be like to have a mother who wanted to remember a first dance, instead of ruin it? Hell, a mother I could even tell I was going to a dance?

I didn’t have time to dwell on this, as next came pinning the corsage on her.

“Here,” I said, taking her corsage out of the box and with it the pins. We were close, and she held her arms behind her back, waiting for me to put it on her chest. The dress came up to her collarbone, leaving me space to work above her breasts, but as I fixed the pins through her dress, into the stem, and back out into the dress, I was aware of her heat, her softness, the smell of hairspray covering her natural scent. I wanted to bring her in closer to me, but let my arms fall away after putting the corsage on.

Primo stepped up then, presenting the corsage to Katniss, peach roses with baby’s breath. She picked up the flowers and pins, then looked to her mother.

“Um, I don’t know how to do this,” Katniss said.

Mrs. Everdeen turned the camera over to Primo, who snapped a picture with Mrs. Everdeen showing Katniss how the pins went in. Katniss tried with the second pin, but after a few attempts groaned and asked her mother to finish it.

Once the flowers had all been secured, Mrs. Everdeen snatched up the camera from Primo. “We have to get a picture of the two of you!”

I stepped beside Katniss and put a hand around her waist, lightly, while Katniss simply stood beside me and smiled as the camera flashed. I dropped my hand, still scorching from my desire to keep it there at her waist.

“I’ll be sure to get your mother a copy of these Peeta,” Mrs. Everdeen said cheerfully.

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” I said. 

“Nonsense, she must miss seeing you off,” Mrs. Everdeen insisted. “She could have come tonight.”

“Early start time at the bakery,” I said, then turned to Katniss. “Ready?”

Her gaze was once again on my mouth as she nodded.

Mrs. Everdeen and Primo followed us out the door, watching as I held the passenger door to my car open and helped Katniss in, waving as we set off for the high school.

“What happened to your lip?” Katniss asked.

“Ran into an open cabinet,” I said. “Right against the edge.”

I kept my concentration on the road, stopping before turning onto the main road to the school, but could still feel Katniss’s gaze on my mouth, frowning and not engaging in conversation about it further. She didn’t believe a word of it, but accepted the lie. Most people did, it was just a matter if they were naive on the matter like Primo, or had no idea what to do about it like Katniss.

“I heard Gale’s band is playing tonight,” I said to change the subject. “But I guess that comes with the territory of being the only real band in town.”

“It’s a low bar to cross, but they manage.” There’s something hard in her voice, despite the joking tone.

“I bet you could upstage them,” I said.

Katniss shook her head, but smiled a little. “You’ve never heard me sing.”

“That’s not true,” I said, since Katniss singing in the church is branded in my memory, and only realizing my mistake after it came out.

“I’ve never sung in public. Not since…” She stopped.

“Sorry,” I quickly said. “I didn’t mean to bring that up.”

I pulled into the school parking lot, filled with cars of other kids flocking down on the school, exiting their vehicles in their suits and dresses, giggling and ready for a fun evening. And I had reminded Katniss of her father’s funeral. 

“It’s been eleven years,” she said flatly.

Was she talking about her father’s death, or the fact that I remembered she sang at the funeral?

“You were the first kid I knew, besides my brothers obviously, whose dad had died,” I said, making my best guess as to what she meant. “I—I hadn’t been allowed to feel anything but shame and sadness about it. When you stood up and sang, you were angry at all of us. Or maybe the situation in general, but I remember getting to feel anger with you. How much it sucked, and how unfair it was. You still sang beautifully, though. It was definitely memorable.”

She gave me a curious look. “I just can’t believe you remember that.”

“I remember everything about you,” I found myself admitting. She straightened up and looked away from me, shifting in her seat. I had to maneuver out of this carefully. “I didn’t mean to bring up this kind of stuff. I’d really like to go to the dance and just have some fun.”

“Primo does say that I need more of that,” Katniss said.

I got out of the car and opened the door for her, and we joined the students showing their tickets at the door. After the freshman took our tickets and we entered the tulle-covered gymnasium, Katniss grabbed hold of my hand, hers small and gloved in mine. I wished I could have felt the skin of her palm, but the unexpected affection made my chest expand with hope.

We went through the line to get our picture taken in front of a sky-blue backdrop surrounded by a lattice arch and fake ivy before turning to the rest of the prom, which was still building up as the band adjusted guitars and sound.

“I don’t know what to do,” Katniss confessed to me. “This is my first dance.”

“We dance the first and last dances together,” I told her. “In between, though, we can dance with other people.”

“Two dances? That’s all?”

“Probably,” I said. “I doubt the guys here will be able to resist asking you to dance, so those are the only chances I’ll have.”

Katniss rolled her eyes. “Please.”

“I mean it,” I said. “You have no idea. The effect you can have.”

With that and a crackle of the mic, Gale’s voice echoed through the gym as Katniss tried to work through what I’d said. 

“Hello class of 1966,” Gale said. “I hope you’re ready to dance, because The Miners are ready to play!”

Couples who had settled at tables surrounding the edges of the gym stood up, and hurried out onto the dance floor as Thom counted out the beats on his drumsticks, launching the band into the intro chords.

“Ready?” I asked, and Katniss nodded, a rare spark in her eye. I lead her onto the dance floor, and Gale’s deep, throaty voice sang:

> _Well, she was just seventeen_  
>  _You know what I mean_  
>  _And the way she looked_  
>  _Was way beyond compare_  
>  _So how could I dance with another_  
>  _Ooh, when I saw her standing there?_

The dancing of the prom was different than the dancing we’d done in P.E. With formalities thrown out of the window, we danced facing one another, moving our bodies however the music moved us. While my dancing could be considered passable at best, Katniss’s movements were free and uninhibited, her eyes half-closed and body jerking to the song. If I’d thought it had been impossible to dance with her near to me, having the space to see her body in its natural movements somehow made it even more impossible to keep my thoughts in an entirely appropriate space. While everyone else at the dance did the twist and mashed potato, Katniss moved in a way all her own, enticing in the way only she could be.

> _Oh, we danced through the night_   
>  _And we held each other tight_   
>  _And before too long_   
>  _I fell in love with her_

I found myself changing my rhythm and moves to match with hers, less hitch hiker and swimming, and instead more head bobbing and shoulder shaking. And despite my awkwardness with dancing in general, letting go of what I’d always seen other people do and instead letting my body break those rules, I hadn’t felt so free in my entire life. 

With a final riff of the guitar, the song ended. Katniss’s eyes fluttered open again, and she smiled up at me.

I moved closer to her, reaching to put my hand on her arm and bring her in closer to me as other students began to turn to find a new partner. Like we were supposed to do. Mix and mingle, and not get closer and closer to one particular person throughout the dance.

“I don’t want a different partner,” I admitted.

“Me either.”

So we didn’t. The next song started, and Katniss and I separated to resume dancing, our own separate bubble from everyone else. When each song ended, we closed the distance and I would put a hand on her arm or her waist, sometimes asking if she wanted to dance with someone else. She always shook her head. After the shuffle of new partners and the start of a new song, we stepped back again and danced.

Halfway through the night, the junior class’s teacher adviser, Miss Cecelia, came on stage then and had everyone return to the tables for the prom court to make their grand turn around the gym and for the king and queen to be announced.

I didn’t have to think about it as I took Katniss’s hand and found a table for us. I pulled out her chair for her, then asked, “Do you want any punch?”

“I think I better,” she said, a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. “Thank you.”

All of the other boys had the same idea, and the table holding the glasses of punch had a clog of sweaty teen guys trying to navigate getting the drinks and getting out without spilling the punch. After I made my way out of the bloodbath and headed back to the table, I noticed Gale in the seat I’d been intending to sit in. Katniss had her back to me, so I couldn’t read her face regarding the situation, but Gale was leaning forward, one elbow on the table.

“—what any of these kids think,” Gale was saying.

I put Katniss’s drink down in front of her. “What’s going on?”

“Gale didn’t prepare any slow dances and he’s trying to force me to fix his mistake for him,” Katniss said, arms folded across her chest.

“No, it’s that The Miners don’t do cheesy crooning numbers,” Gale said.

“I don’t either,” Katniss said.

“I’ve heard you strum a guitar,” Gale said. “It’s always slow and soft. You can make it sound romantic like it’s supposed to.”

“Look, Gale, she said she doesn’t want to sing,” I said. “Even if she wanted to, she’s not being paid to play this dance. You are.”

Katniss took a drink of her punch and leaned back in her chair, detaching herself from the conversation. Gale huffed. “Dammit, Katniss. How can you consider yourself an artist if you only ever let Primo hear you sing?”

With that, Gale scraped the chair back and stormed back toward the stage. I took back my seat, facing Katniss instead of the stage where the three of the potential prom kings and queens waited as Miss Cecelia announced the next pair of royalty hopefuls.

“Sorry about Gale,” Katniss said. “He’s been really pushy lately.”

“Pushy?” I asked.

Katniss shook her head, exasperated. “Wanting me to do things the Gale way. He thinks he’s the smartest person on this planet and I’m a dumb kid who needs to do what he says.”

“Like getting you to sing in front of people.”

She nodded, taking a sip of the punch. 

“Why don’t you?” I asked. “Sing in front of others?”

“We’ve talked about this,” Katniss said. “It’s personal to sing in front of everyone. And it’s none of their business.”

“You danced in front of everyone.”

“So?”

“Isn’t that personal, too?”

“It didn’t feel too personal. It just felt like the two of us.”

“Well, would you sing for me?”

“With everyone else—” 

I put my hand on top of hers on the table. “Just look at me. Pretend no one else is in the audience but me. And the good news is, I’m your biggest fan.”

Miss Cecelia announced the prom queen as Glimmer Montgomery, and her squeals of delight overcame the applause. 

“I can’t,” Katniss whispered, barely audible over all of the clapping. People always saw Katniss as so intimidating, myself included, but now I see the glimpse into the truth. She’s scared, like everyone else. She just makes up for it with the scowls and cold shoulders.

I squeezed her hand. “Maybe someday.”

When Marvel Samson is announced as the prom king, he joined Glimmer and they received a pair of costume crowns and a sash noting their place over the rest of us. After the applause died down, Gale got up to the microphone, a long black hair falling in his eyes before he slicked the piece back again.

“The Miners will be passing the King and Queen’s dance song to Katniss Everdeen,” Gale said. “Katniss, you can get up here now.”

_The son of a bitch_ —

Katniss clutched onto my hand as eyes fell on her, slowly as those farther away located where she was sitting. A slow clapping began, encouraging her to get up and sing the song they thought she had planned.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. “I’ll get up, I can say you’re feeling sick—”

She shook her head . “Stay where I can see you.”

“Of course.”

She let go of my hand, peeled off her gloves and handed them to me, then walked up to the stage where Gale handed her an acoustic guitar. Marvel and Glimmer, puffed up and proud of the class determining them the king and queen, descended from the stage and onto the dance floor as Katniss adjusted the guitar on her shoulder. I stood up and moved closer. Katniss looked out in the audience, finding our old table and scanning until she saw me, then strummed a haunting melody on her guitar. When she sang, her voice came out as sweet and heavy and corn syrup.

> _To the queen of hearts is the ace of sorrow_  
>  _He's here today, he's gone tomorrow_  
>  _Young men are plenty but sweethearts few_  
>  _If my love leaves me what shall I do?_

Other couples joined Marvel and Glimmer, some eager to finally be holding each other close. I stood apart from them, no one to dance with, but I was the only one who had Katniss’s gaze. She occasionally glanced down to her guitar, but when lifting her eyes again, found me. I wondered at her choice of such a sorrowful song, caught up in the grief as she sang of a woman pleading to go with her true love. Katniss hadn’t had a sweetheart before, at least no one I knew, yet she sang like she knew the pain of a doomed love. Katniss ended the song as she started it, wondering what to do at the departure of her love, and the last note hovered in uncertainty.

She didn’t pause to accept the applause, but unwound the guitar strap from her shoulder and handed it off to Bristel before hurrying off the stage. The Miners settled themselves back on the stage as Katniss found me.

“Let’s go,” she said. “I can’t face anyone after that.”

“Okay,” I said, though a little disappointed. The dance would still be going for another hour, and I wanted to dance with Katniss again. But she seemed shaken after what Gale pulled, and I wouldn’t be pushing her any further. I put a hand on the small of her back and led her out the door of the gym as The Miners struck up another high-energy rock song.

After we got into my car and I turned the engine, Katniss spoke up. “I can’t go home yet. Mother and Primo—they don’t think I’ll be home until ten at earliest.”

“Well,” I said. “We don’t need anyone but the two of us to dance. And you have access to a whole store of records, right?”

I couldn’t believe how Katniss smiled yet again tonight. “And I can hunt us up some fries.”

“See? What do we need a school dance for?”

I set off for Main Street, while Katniss rolled down her window and closed her eyes as the chilled night air filled the car. A curl fluttered against her shoulder, lighting with a yellow street lamp before darkness hid her again. I had trouble keeping my eyes on the road instead of her, the girl I’d dreamed about since I was five.

I was the luckiest bastard in the whole world that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title: "I Saw Her Standing There" by the Beatles (thanks to katnissisbrown for the suggestion!)  
> Katniss's song: "Queen of Hearts" by Joan Baez.
> 
> Funny story, but the whole ASL/"horny" story actually happened in my ASL class. My teacher was more horrified than amused, but I thought it was hilarious.  
> I did have a picture of Katniss's prom dress, but I lost the link and now I can't find it again! :/ Also, I found the weirdest video on how proms supposedly were in the 60s, but it felt too fancy and I didn't like it, so I combined some old notions of dancing that I could find with the more modern 60s dance etiquette that was going on. Other than that video I had little to go off of for what proms in the 1960s were like, so this is just my interpretation.  
> I was going to keep going with this, but it was getting really long and I thought hm, we haven't seen Katniss's POV on this whole prom thing yet, so she'll be finishing up the prom night in the next chapter! :D


	8. I'll Never Find Another You: Katniss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just going to not make any predictions on future updates because life is having fun kicking me around lately.  
> But...anyway, this was such a sweet chapter to write, I hope you like it too!

Although I’ve known of Peeta since my father’s funeral, I’ve only truly known him for less than a month. So I’m surprised that as he drives us toward Main Street, I’m not eager for the evening to be over. I could likely even go home and only catch grief from Primo this evening about coming home early. But there’s something about Peeta that puts me at ease, a rarity for me. It took several years of Madge and I becoming de facto partners for me to be open with her, and a year of working at Ripper’s with Gale. 

I opened my eyes and found Peeta approaching Main Street. 

“Pull over in front of Greasy Sae’s,” I said.

The red and white neon lights lit up the diner’s sign, marking it as a a key institution in our little town. Peeta parked the car on the street outside and cut the engine. I didn’t want to wait around for Peeta to get out and open the door for me, and got out myself and onto the sidewalk. Peeta followed me. 

As he joined me, I said, “Let me do the talking. Greasy Sae likes me.”

“She likes me, too,” Peeta said.

“Sure, but not _free fries_ likes you.”

“I can pay for some fries.”

“But we can get them for free if you let me do the talking.”

I led him up to the diner, a little strip of a restaurant with enough room for plastic red stools against a bar and a row of booths covered in the same plastic red. Neon blue lights lined the edges of the ceiling, casting a glow onto the sticky linoleum tiles. The town sheriff, Cray, sat in one stool, and a group of sophomores in one of the booths. I pointed at one of the booths and looked at Peeta with raised eyebrows. He obeyed my implied command and sat down there.

“Hey Sae,” I called while ducking behind the booth and went into the kitchen. Greasy Sae, a short woman in her fifties with salt and pepper hair stuffed into a hair net, manned the griddles, one for hamburgers and one for pancakes.

“Katniss! What’re you doing here?” Sae asked. “You never come around here anymore unless it’s for work.”

“I’d come around more if I had time.”

“So why are you here now?”

“Seeing if you have any fries you’re getting ready to throw out.” I only offered a small smile. Greasy Sae hated it when people laid it on too thick, which worked perfectly for me.

Sae scoffed. “You kids, always after those fries.”

“What? No point in wasting them.”

“No point in giving them away for free, either.”

“Aw, come on, Sae. I’m on my first date.” Greasy Sae, like Primo, had always told me I needed to enjoy my youth. Go out and kiss some boys, she’d say. I might not have wanted to call it a date before with Peeta, but I had to butter up Sae just right.

She laughed. “Good. Then make him pay for it. He’s the man, isn’t he?”

“I thought you were different than all that,” I said. “Still, I kind of made him leave the prom early and I’m trying to make up for it.”

“There are other ways you could make it up to him,” Greasy Sae said. “Boys have a taste for more than fries, you know.”

“I can’t go around getting a reputation like that,” I protested, trying to keep the heat from rising in my cheeks.

“Fine. Two sides of fries, not a spud more, and you have to clean out the fryer next week,” Sae said.

“I’ll do trash duty two weekends in a row.”

“Clean out the refrigerator tomorrow.”

“Deal.”

I went to our takeout bags and picked out one of the brown bags, filling it with two sides of fries from the fryer, then throwing on some salt on the fries. I came out a moment later with grease darkening the bottom of the bag in random spots. I joined Peeta in the booth across from him and plopped the bag of fries down victoriously.

“I never knew Katniss Everdeen had such persuasive powers,” Peeta said.

“Haggling is a dying art in America.”

I took a napkin from the dispenser and squirted ketchup on it. Then I dipped my fry as Peeta pulled out one for himself and ate it dry.

“Ew, do you not put anything on your fries?” I asked.

“I do, but I prefer mayo. I don’t care for ketchup.”

My mouth hung agape. “Mayo? That’s worse than eating it dry!”

Peeta grinned and ate another fry to rub it in, but then winced and covered his mouth.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Salt. In my cut.” Peeta drew in a sharp breath. “I’ll have to remember to only eat from the other side.”

His split lip again. Thinking about what could have happened, what his mother had done to him, and I couldn’t stand to be quiet about it anymore. Before I knew Peeta I felt a deep pity for him, but now I just felt angry.

“You know there are laws against that kind of thing now,” I said, my voice low so neither Cray nor the group toward the back would hear.

“What? Self-inflicted salt in the wound?” Peeta asked.

“No, I mean what your mother does to you.” While not a mother myself, I couldn’t imagine treating Primo with half the visciousness I’d seen on Peeta through the years. I wanted her to have to pay for it in some way.

Peeta laughed, humorlessly. “Yeah, and a fat lot of good they do for anyone.”

“It’s horrible,” I said, venom in my words. “She shouldn’t get away with it, you shouldn’t have to deal with it.”

“I’m telling you, it won’t make a difference,” he said. “When I was eight, we really needed money. So my ma became a foster parent. She fed the poor kid, Lenny, the same pitiful beans and Wonder bread we had to eat, and she hit him just as much as she hit me. Been to seven other homes before ours. Said only two of them were nice enough. Didn’t like him, but he didn’t get hit or starved. It was when we fostered him that I realized people took away kids whose parents hurt them. But I also realized they put them in homes that did the same stuff their parents did. So what’s the point? Why leave my school and friends? Or have other people know about what I’d been through?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and Peeta shrugged it off. But he looked so put out after we’d been having an overall good evening. So after a pause, I said, “I haven’t told anyone this before.”

This caught Peeta’s attention and he lifted his head to look at me. I took a deep breath before continuing. “After my father died, my mother shut down. I mean she would just lay in bed, even if I was holding a crying Primo in front of her face. I was so young, but I figured out how to take my red wagon down to the store, buy some food, and go back home. But soon I had no cash, and the checks coming in just sat in their envelopes. I had no idea what to do. I think, if I hadn’t answered the phone when my nonna called and I hadn’t cried to her about what was happening, we might have been taken away, too. I didn’t know about that until, well…you already mentioned Lenny. It scared me to think Primo and I could’ve been taken away from our mother, too. My mother wasn’t right for years after. Sometimes I still feel disconnected to her because even after she got up and became a nurse, she hardly made an effort to be a mother. Not really until my nonna died, and she realized it was all up to her.”

“I didn’t know that,” Peeta said quietly. “I used to always wish my ma was like yours.”

“She’s a step up,” I said. “But still not easy.”

“I wonder if it is for anyone,” Peeta said. 

I thought about Madge and her caring parents, but the struggle of living in the political spotlight and her mother’s bouts of illness. Of Gale and the loss of his father, and his kind but overworked mother watching after her four kids.

“Probably not.”

“Maybe if we can just find our way to Mayberry.”

“Mayberry?”

“ _Andy Griffith Show_?” Peeta asked, then dropped his jaw when I shook my head. “You don’t watch _Andy Griffith_?”

I shrugged. “I don’t really watch TV.”

“You can’t work so much you don’t watch TV.”

“I suppose I could, I just don’t.”

From there, our conversation turned easy, as Peeta made his recommendations for TV, and then asked me about what I did when I wasn’t working and I told him about how I liked to hike and camp and swim, though I left my father out of this conversation. Our mothers had already hung too heavy over the start of it all. I told him about the time I ran into a bear and had to climb up a tree to get away from it, and the whole time Peeta stared at me and asked questions as if I were the greatest storyteller in the whole world. I knew that was wrong, because Peeta sharing his first foray into construction work made my bear story look like it was only a bunny chasing me.

When we had reached the end of our fries, Peeta asked, “Would you still want to go to Ripper’s and finish out our dance?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

Ripper’s was so close to Greasy Sae’s that we decided to walk the block to the music store, the street sleepy despite it being a Friday. The lights at Ripper’s had been turned out, only outlines of the counter and record stands were visible. I fished out the keys in the pocket of the dress I was grateful Madge had said she’d insisted be put into this dress. I pulled out my key ring and found the one for Ripper’s. 

Once the door was open and we were inside, I turned on a desk lamp by the counter. I didn’t want anyone to think we were open and draw attention to the store, so that was the only light I turned on.

“Anything you want to listen to?” I asked Peeta.

“I think I should defer to your taste in music.”

“Well, pull out some of your own and we’ll make it a mix.”

I moved to the A’s and started going through the records. Peeta started on the other side, and after we had flipped and found a few records, we met at the record player at the front. Peeta’s stack was comparatively much smaller than mine.

“What do you have?” I asked.

Peeta showed the orange cover of Buddy Holly’s first album sheepishly. “I know he’s old, but he’s one of my favorites.”

“I like him,” I said. “Been forever since I listened to this album.”

Peeta smiled and sighed, as if in relief he hadn’t picked something I hated. I put the record onto the turntable and asked, “What’s your favorite song?”  
“Everyday.”

I checked the track number and put the record around where the track should begin. After catching the tail end of the previous song in the album, Peeta’s request came on. Peeta grabbed hold of my hand and drew me close to him, as we’d danced when practicing the waltz. My half-lidded eyes opened as my heart rate increased, surprised at the closeness.

“I used to wait for this song to come on the radio,” Peeta said as he turned us around across the floor, not following any discernible dance step pattern.

“It’s a good one,” I said as Buddy sang:

> _Everyday, it's a-gettin' closer_   
>  _Goin' faster than a roller coaster_   
>  _Love like yours will surely come my way_   
>  _A-hey, a-hey, hey_

“It’s more than that,” Peeta said. “It’s knowing that what you really want in life, it’s just a matter of time before it comes.”

I rolled my eyes. “If you’re lucky. And if what you want can even happen.”

“What’s the point of getting out of bed if that’s the sort of attitude you have?” Peeta asked playfully.

“I guess to be pleasantly surprised when I’m wrong,” I said. “Though to be clear, that’s not very often.”

He smiled at me. “Sure, Katniss.”

It felt like someone had reached in my chest and squeezed my heart just then with Peeta’s smile on me. And for a moment, in Peeta’s arms and listening to Buddy sound hopeful, a piece of that optimism crept inside my heart. Maybe just once, things can be different. Maybe someday I won’t just be getting through the days.

After the song, Peeta let me go, and we danced independently like we had at the prom for a few more songs before I changed the record over to The Byrds, the sound so different than the bopping rock and roll of Buddy. 

“Where did you learn to dance like that?” Peeta asked me.

I stopped, suddenly self-conscious. “Like what?”

“No, it’s good, I like it,” Peeta assured me, touching my hand briefly before letting go. “I just haven’t seen anyone dance like that.”

“I guess Bristel,” I said. “She goes to Chicago sometimes and dances there.”

“Wow, all the way to Chicago?”

I just shrug. Bristel had only told me two months ago she goes there to meet other women. She says in Ohio she can get her fill of men, but when she’s longing for a woman, she wanders to Chicago. Given the attitudes of our home town, I knew this confidence was something I had to honor, even from Peeta, whom I couldn’t imagine intentionally hurting anyone.

“Have you been to Chicago?” Peeta asked.

“No. The farthest I’ve been is Columbus,” I said.

Peeta’s dancing slowed as he responded, “Wait, you’ve never even left Ohio?”

“Never had a reason to.”

Peeta seemed shocked, his eyebrows raised. “I guess I thought with all of that Bob Dylan music, you’d be a wanderer.”

“I’d like to go to different places,” I clarified. “But having a home, a place with a few people I love…maybe I’m not so revolutionary.”

Peeta’s stare was almost unbearable after I said that. I had to look down to be sure I was still dressed, as it felt like I were naked in front of him. My body moved in tighter quarters and a slower pace. When he spoke, his voice was soft, so I had to take a step closer to him. “It’s what we should all want, isn’t it? Changing what’s unfair, but holding onto what’s good already.”

I nodded. “People don’t get it. Either they want everything the same, or they want to change everything.”

Peeta took my hand then. He didn’t pull me closer in to dance, or let go. We stood there, the music still playing, until he looked up at me and said, “Can we put on The Seekers single? I pulled it out earlier.”

“Okay.” I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed to let go of Peeta’s hand to pull out the small single record for The Seekers and switch out the records. The guitar began the song and the rest of the instruments joined in. As I turned back around to the floor space we’d been dancing on, Peeta was waiting there, his hand out again. I took it and he pulled me in again. More and more, his arms were somewhere I felt safe, and now somewhere I wanted to be. I found myself falling in closer to him, until our chests were flush against each other as we spun around to the music.

> _There is always someone_   
>  _For each of us, they say_   
>  _And you'll be my someone_   
>  _Forever and a day_   
>  _I could search the whole world over_   
>  _Until my life is through_   
>  _But I know I'll never find another you_

As we danced, the guard I usually had up disappeared. Something about tonight, or the song, or maybe, maybe it was just Peeta, but between the musky scent of Peeta’s cologne, the broadness of his shoulders, the way he held me so protectively yet gingerly, and the curls at the nape of his neck my fingers found, all that occupied my thoughts for those couple of minutes was how secure I felt. I hadn’t felt in such a way since my father left for war.

> _But if I should lose your love, dear_   
>  _I don't know what I'd do_   
>  _For I know I'll never find another you_   
>  _Another you, another you_

With the end of the song, the record player sounded nothing but empty air. Still, neither of us moved for a few more minutes until I pulled back and said, “I should be getting home.”

Peeta nodded and his arms let me go. We put back the records, then locked up the store and walked hand-in-hand back to Peeta’s car. Even when Peeta got into his seat, once he pulled out onto the street, he reached over and put his hand on top of mine. I thought of the few encounters I’d had with boys and men who’d gotten too familiar with me too quickly, and how their touch repulsed me. How was it that Peeta could be male just like them, but make me feel so completely opposite to those same individuals? 

When we park in front of my house, I let him open the car door for me and we walk up the pathway to my front door.

“Well, except for my arm being twisted to sing in front of everyone, I had a really good time tonight,” I said.

“And except for my split lip, I did, too,” Peeta said. “So I guess that means next time we just leave other people out of it.”

I wasn’t experienced in—okay, I had to admit what this was— _dating_ , so I had no idea how to end the date. A handshake seemed too impersonal after that dance, but even if Peeta’s lip weren’t split, I wasn’t ready to kiss him yet. Instead, I did lean in, but instead to kiss him on the cheek. As I pulled back and pink bloomed across his cheeks, I said, “Good night.”

I left him on the doorstep like that. Mother was watching TV. After responding to her questions about the evening in vague ways, I went up to my room, changing out of Madge’s dress and cleaning off make-up with cold cream. Laying in my bed, Peeta’s presence fading from my bones and skin, Peeta’s words of _next time, next time, next time_ , echoed in my head.

Next time. Words of promise and expectation, something I began to worry I wouldn’t be able to maintain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title "I'll Never Find Another You" by The Seekers.  
> And as referenced in the chapter, "Everyday" by Buddy Holly.


End file.
